TA 

£.57 




Sv^C&S 






AN 
ENGINEERING STUDENT'S 

NOTES 



Technical, Philosophical 
and Otherwise 



BY J. RICHARDS 



lt The true epic of our time is not arms and the man, but tools 
and the man, an infinitely wider kind of epic." — Carlyle. 



San 


Francisco, 


Cal. 


NDUSTRIAL PUBLISHING COMPANY 


22 


CALIFORNIA STREET 




1904 






^ 




) i J 







1 



LIBRARY of C0N6RESS 
Two Copies Received 

JUN 30 1904 

1 CooyrlKht Entry 
OLASS *■ XXo. Na 
' COPY B 






Entered according to Act of Congress, by John-Richards, 

in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, 

in the year 190k. 



PREFACE. 



The subject matter that makes up most of the present book 
was written between the years 1890 and 1897, and published in the 
Magazine "Industry," of which publication the writer was the 
editor during that period. 

The title assumed at that time was "Extracts from a 
Note Book — by Techno," began and for some time continued 
as a means of instructing students and apprentices in the processes 
of engineering work by a half-humorous treatment that would 
divest the subject of its usual formal and dry presentment in 
technical books. 

The articles met with much commendation, but it was found 
after five or six chapters had been prepared that the field was too 
circumscribed, and that the " Extracts " must extend into the 
outer world and change their form, or cease. A new scheme was 
adopted in the sixth article, where the present revision begins, 
omitting, with a few exceptions, so much as would fail to have 
interest for non-technical readers. 

J. R. 

San Francisco, July, 1904. 



CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Chapter I 5-11 

Corrugated Water — Getting Struck — Steam 
Steering Gear — A Case of Friction— Sea Sick- 
ness — The Copernican System. 

Chapter II 11-15 

Sea Engines — Essay on Boilers — A Versatile 
Scotchman — How to Raise an Obelisk — The 
Lost Arts — Barnacle Geese. 

Chapter III . . . . . . 15-21 

A Smell of Erin— Up in the Mail— At Inchi- 
core — Axle Grease — New Names — Flattened 
Out — How to See a Channel Steamer — A 
Lecture on Ireland. 

Chapter IV 21-25 

Gang Awa' Till New York— The Effect of 
Two Turns a Minute — British Locomotives 
— New London. 

Chapter V 25-29 

Penn and Maudslay — London Penny Boats 
— Shipbuilding on the Thames — Dry Loam. 

Chapter VI 29-33 

A Steam Hammer for Gravity — A steamboat 
on a Hill — Explosives on the Pacific Coast 
— The Line of Least Resistance. 

Chapter VII 34-37 

Isle of Man— Manx Cats— Pickled at Sea — 
Kippers — Laxa Water Wheel — Pears' Soap. 



CONTENTS 

Page 

Chapter VIII 38-41 

The Science of Wagons — Jams in Broadway 
— London Drivers — Building Cities. 

Chapter IX 42-61 

Docks at Millwall — Goths and Vandals — A 
Scarcity of Soil — A Hotel Commander — The 
Curious Kalkelung — A Fire to Last Twenty- 
Four Hours — The Red Annex. 

Chapter X 61-66 

Swedish Omnibuses — A Busy King Who 
Earns His Salary — Horizontal Sunshine — A 
London Steamboat Company — Tin-Pot 
Steamers. 

Chapter XI ..... 66-71 

On Draughting — Swedish Methods — Euro- 
pean Shop Practice — An English Plan For 
Forging Sheets — How to Draw a Dump Car 
— Swedish Ink Pallets — Ltibeck Steamers. 

Chapter XII 71-75 

Navigating in a Meadow — Hanse Towns — 
Old Churches and Relics — An Irreverent 
View — Old Coins and Cabinet Ware — Hol- 
land and the Dutch. 

Chapter XIII 75-80 

A Stubborn People — Francs and Florins — 
Holland Taken by the Dutch — A Rational 
Battle — Emigrants Need Not Apply. 

Chapter XIV 81-96 

Little Beige— The Giant Antigonus— British 
Fortifications — Mons Meg — Dog Traction — 
A City Set on a Hill. 

Chapter XV 96-102 

On a Domestic Tour — Knickerbocker Dutch 
— The Member from Chatahooga — American 
Railway Carriages— The Genesse. 



CONTENTS 

Page 

Chapter XVI 102-110 

Deacon Barton — A Corporation with a Soul 

— A Questionable Mill Site — Junius Judson 

— A Race Problem — Electric Towing — 
Schemes and Crimes. 

Chapter XVII 110-117 

La Salle's Trip — Napoleou Annihilated— St. 
Anthony's Falls — Catching Pickerel — A Fishy 
Story— Acclimating Fruit — Other Things. 

Chapter XVIII 117-125 

How a Steamboat Finds Its Way— The Tip- 
pecanoe Estate — General Harrison on Ancient 
Mounds — A Learned President — "When Dead 
How Soon We Are Forgot." — A Toboggan 
Feat. 

Chapter XIX 125-132 

Low-Pressure Steamboat Engines — Also 
Compound Engines — An Old Water- Works 
Engine — How Cities are Built — The First of 
Steam-Moved Valves — An Astonishing Car- 
pet Bag — Cincinnati as an Original Town. 

Chapter XX ...... 132-138 

A Monologue on the Mississippi — How a 
River Operates — What a Million is — What 
One Gains by Observing — A Homily on 
Human Effort. 

Chapter XXI 138-145 

An Indian Massacre — A Queer Water Craft — 
An Essay on "Bilers" — A Cast- Iron Doctor. 

Chapter XXII 145-155 

A Saintly City — Six Miles of Steamboats — 
A Fallen City — A Top Drainage System — A 
Pavement for 200 Years — Carpet Baggers — 
River Pirates — A Bridge 22 Miles Long — On 
Flat Boats. 



CONTENTS 

Page 

Chapter XXIII 156-161 

A Pitch-Pine Country — A Screed on Slavery 
— How to Set a Telegraph Pole — Boring Out 
a Fly Wheel — How to Settle a New Country 
— Pacific Loast. 

Chapter XXIV 162-168 

On the Pacific Coast — Talking Svensk — 
Moving a Country — Canadian Pacific — Van- 
couver — How Climates are Made 

Chapter XXV 169-175 

A Cracked Country — Imaginative History — 
A Storm Factor)- — European Dress — A Mis- 
take in Hops — The Normal Line. 

Chapter XXVI 176-182 

Machine Tool Makers — Flexible Drilling 
Machines — Grindstone Frames — Balancing 
Mandrels — An Idea In Salt Cellars. 

Chapter XXVII 182-188 

Brahmanism — A High Country — Something 
About Miracles — Hypnotism — A Novel Type 
of Steamboats — Improving a River. 

Chapter XXVIII 188-201 

Population Wanted — The Lead Pipe Cinch — 
Pioneering — A New-Made Country — A Man 
From Bolivar. 



AN ENGINEERING STUDENT'S NOTES, 



CHAPTER I. 



CORRUGATED WATER GETTING STRUCK STEAM STEERING 

GEAR A CASE OF FRICTION SEA SICKNESS 

THE COPERNICAN SYSTEM. 

The writer, an ' ' Improver " in an Engin- 



eering Office and Works, had for a number of years been 
climbing with commendable effort the long ladder that 
leads up to an evanishing proficiency in an art that has 
no ending. His eyesight, digestion and spinal stability 
had to an extent been sacrificed on the altar of effort, 
when he discovered that no art or profession is worth 
much if learned in the ' ' abstract, ' ' and that really useful 
knowledge of anything must include the "concrete." 

We are at this day continually reminded that knowl- 
edge of the applied arts must be specialized, which is 
true if we consider men as machines, and in modern 
practice a great share of them have to be so considered 
and employed, but another portion must be more than 
this. They must be thinking factors, comparing and 
analyzing all around their immediate work, otherwise 
there can be but little progress made. 

This was to me an agreeable revelation, accepted at 
once at full value, and fortunately circumstances per- 
mitted an experiment which furnishes subject matter 
for these notes. 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 



-An uncle of mine, a marine engineer, an 



eccentric but able man in his calling, and in many other 
ways as will appear, sent word that he was to "stop 
ashore" for some months, and invited me to "go over" 
with him on the next trip out and have a ' ' look around. ' ' 

The "over" meant to cross the Atlantic Ocean and 
the "look around," I inferred from his letter, meant a 
trip around work shops, ship yards, and so on, in Europe. 
My delight at this may be imagined. 

My uncle is a salt water engineer, commonly taciturn 
and positive, with a good deal of eccentricity in his make- 
up — a mechanical agnostic, in so far as new inventions; 
certain of his opinions which embrace a world of subjects, 
and detests argument. 

I got leave of absence, and after a week of events that 
have no interest here, I found myself on a North At- 
lantic "liner" with my uncle, who went out as a passen- 
ger to, as he said, "see how it felt." 

After twenty-four hours out things settled down and 
I hunted np my note book, and here is my first entry : 

— In the smoking-room last night, where 

my uncle spends most of his time, he was asked how high 
sea waves rose in a storm. "Don't rise at all," said he, 
"A landsman's idea. They are blown off. People think 
waves are made like corrugated iron to a regular pitch. 
Best description I ever heard was from a child who said 
in time of a storm, 'the sea is all torn up.' In a gale of 
wind there is some regularity of waves; in a storm, 
none. You may be 'struck' once an hour, once a day, 
or not at all. Next, you will ask: What is being 
'struck' ? I anticipate you and say I do not know. Rail- 
ings, davits, boats and deck houses gone. That's being 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 7 

'struck.' Better learn it by precept if you can, the ex- 
ample is not attractive." 

— 1 blundered on the steam steering gearing 

today, in an iron house on the main deck, and found 
enough to make a note of. The Mechanical Professor 
gave us quite a lecture on this subject one time, but then 
we scarcely knew what steering meant, or whether it 
required ten pounds or a thousand to move the rudder; 
it was then difficult to understand much about steam 
steering, but I am at the "bottom of it now." 

One thing I do not understand and can get no light 
upon is this : If a ship is lying still and the extreme of 
the rudder is fastened to some stationary object it re- 
quires five times as much force to swing the ship as it 
would if she were under way. The movement through 
the water has to do with this. 

The Professor explained, and showed us at college, 
how a close-fitting shaft, while being passed through a 
hole, could be turned with the hands while it was moving 
endwise, but could not be budged with a lever if the end 
movement ceased. It seems to be the same way in steer- 
ing a ship or boat, but I am forgetting the steam gear. 

There are a great many modifications, but only two 
types, so far as I can find out. One, wherein there are 
a pair of small engines connected at right angles and the 
eccentrics turned by the small steering wheel. Of course 
the engines follow the eccentrics, whether they may be 
turned right or left, so the labor on the wheel is no more 
than moving the valves, but even this is too much for our 
day, and the whole is steam controlled on large ships; 
the "wheel" has only to indicate. The reversing is 
done by changing the induction to the exhaust, and the 



8 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

degree of movement is regulated by an * ' overtake ' ' valve, 
that follows up and closes at any point. 

This may be clear, but I doubt it; however any one 
who wants to know more can use this as a clue and look 
the matter up for themselves. Our steering gearing is of 
the old simple kind, the tiller wheel connected to the 
eccentrics; anybody can understand that. 

Some remarks of my uncle last evening, 

"anent" friction, as Tweed, the Scotchman, would say, 
called to mind a little experience of my own that will 
do for a note here. 

When out on the Pacific Coast, some time ago, I made 
frequent trips on a particularly nice steamboat called the 
San Rafael. She was built on the model of the old 
Staten Island boats at New York, before the present huge 
boats were put on, and was a clean cut specimen of the 
best beam engine practice. She steamed at the rate of 
fourteen to sixteen miles an hour, in regular service, on 
her seven mile runs. 

Mr. Jones, the engineer, an old North River man, is an 
adept on beam engines, who more than anyone else I 
have ever met understands the "genesis," "thesis," and 
all besides of this type of "steam machines." I was in 
his engine room one day, just as we were to leave a land- 
ing, when he glanced at the indicator and saw the engine 
was dead on the center ! 

Mr. Jones called down to the fire room, "Tom, come 
up and turn the wheel off the center." I watched for 
Tom expecting to see him emerge with a hydraulic jack, 
a set of chain tackle, or at least a pinch bar, but he had 
nothing of the kind. He walked over to the port wheel, 
opened a door, set one foot on a float, caught one above 
with his hand, and turned that 800 horse power engine 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 9 

10 degrees with not more than 160 pounds weight on the 
wheel. I never was so much astonished in my life, and 
expect the reader to be the same — but it is true. It is a 
pretty tough story, but can be demonstrated at any time 
by going out to San Francisco, and it is well worth a 
journey there to see it 2 if there are no examples nearer 
home. 

"You see 2 " said Mr. Jones, "this keying up, setting 
out springs and general tension on things is a humbug. 
A skilled man keeps his engine slack and at the same 
time without play. Why that piston is as tight as a cork 
in a bottle and still is hanging loose in the cylinder. I 
have two springs opposite the steam ports blocked with 
wood to keep the inrush of the steam from pushing the 
piston over to the other side. I can open one of those 
exhaust valves and that vacuum will stand there for 
half an hour ! ' ' 

I am going to read this note to my uncle, and write 
some of his remarks, unless they are too explosive for this 
modest collection of notes. 

1 have escaped sea-sickness, and had the 

pleasure of listening to a lecture on this subject by my 
uncle, delivered last evening in the smoking-room, in 
substance thus: "Sea-sickness is a mental malady, in a 
sense; that is, it can be cured mentally. I have seen a 
whole mess of sea-sick persons cured in one minute by an 
alarm of fire. Sometimes ladies are cured by a steward 
spilling the soup in their laps. I have several times seen 
people fall over the rail when 'heaving up' and when we 
fished them out of the water no trace of the complaint 
remained. It is no laughing matter though — not in any 
sense. 



10 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 



The claim that it is good for general health is a hum- 
bug — a gross humbug. An emetic is a good thing in 
this time of ours when everyone eats like a cormorant, 
and that far sea-sickness may do some good. Prevent it, 
you say ! Well, in the first place, have nothing to do with 
doctors or their nostrums. Sea-sickness is not always 
alike, but generally begins with acidity of the stomach, 
and this acidity is the result, usually, of one of two 
factors or both, liquids and grease. "When ill, lie on your 
back fore and aft ship, and swallow broken ice, slowly. I 
don't mean at first, but after a few hours when the stom- 
ach is sure to be inflamed and hot, while your hands 
and feet will be cold. When you get the boiler, I mean 
stomach, cooled off and empty, well seasoned beef tea, 
broth, and if you can get it, cream, are suitable things 
to fill up on. The only medicine you need is some alka- 
line to correct acidity, calcined magnesia is best. For 
solid diet fat pork or old cheese" — just here several 
pale-looking pessengers made for the door, and my 
uncle lit his pipe. 

1 never got a clear conception of the 

"Copernican system" until last night. We have no 
clear air on land. At sea on a clear night you gaze into 
the firmament and see the planets as spheres, see how 
they are set in space. The impression is wonderful. You 
may have a "belief" in the truths of astronomy. A 
clear night at sea gives you ' ' conviction ' ' of these truths. 
You are skimming along on the sea with five-eighths of 
an inch between you and eternity; driven by what an 
hour ago seemed the most wonderful of inventions. Now, 
gazing into the mass of whirling worlds, each moving 
in rythm of course and time, this trifling little contriv- 
ance of man — a steamship — is but an insignificant atom 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 11 

in this vast machinery of the Universe. This note will 
run into poetry if not stopped here. 



CHAPTER II. 



SEA ENGINES ESSAY ON BOILERS A VERSATILE SCOTCH- 
MAN HOW TO RAISE AN OBELISK THE LOST 

ARTS BARNACLE GEESE. 

The engines, simple compound, go on 



forever. The chief, who my uncle knows, has taken an 
interest in me and ' ' chalked my coat, ' ' that is, given me 
a pass down below. Sixty revolutions per minute of 60 
inches stroke, is 600 feet of piston speed. A surface 
speed on the crank-pins of 300 feet a minute and no 
stopping to key up, for any cause. Six hundred thou- 
sand turns between ports. Seven days at 600 feet per 
minute of piston speed! Just think of going to a land 
engineer with his machinery fixed to immovable founda- 
tions, and ask him to run an engine of 8,000 horse power 
for seven days without slowing for a stroke ; not for once, 
but for scores of times and continually. He could not 
do it, at least don't do it. Nor can he feed such an en- 
gine with less than two pounds of coal per horse power 
per hour, as they do here. My uncle says: "Land en- 
gines, my boy, are not made like these. They have 
neither the workmanship, nor material, neither have 
they the care. Here are hundreds of engines in 'similar 
use.' Competition, emulation and guarantee are all 
wanting, or nearly so, in land engines. These are not 
'rattle trap' machines with a score or more of pin joints 
to work the valves. Imagine a Corliss or Proel rig on 
one of those engines. The whole thing would go to 



12 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 



'smithereens' in a month, or at least want to. Mr. Jor- 
dan, of the Guion Line, tried Corliss valves and failed. 
The clatter and roar of the engine room reminded one 
of a shot separator. Jordan tried a good many things; 
built the Montana and Dakota with water tube boilers, 
busted the company and quit. Go down into the engine 
room and count up the joints and pieces. Then count 
up a land engine's pieces and compare. The great 
science of construction is to 'leave out pieces.' Marine 
engineers leave out pieces, land engineers hunt places to 
add them. It is seven bells. Time to turn in. ' ' 

Next morning I found my uncle in a 

talkative mood — that is, for him, and tackled him on 
boilers. "Boilers," said he, "are seen at sea. On land 
you have kettles set in brick and burn five pounds of 
coal to a horse power. The place to fire a boiler is in the 
boiler, not alongside. You must give up this idea of out- 
side firing for a time. You will see but little of it in 
Europe. I have had little to do with bricked-up boilers 
and want less in future. A man who wants a good boiler 
must pay for it ; must have enough boiler to give heating 
surface inside, not on the outer shell. These outside 
boilers are an expedient of cheapness, so also are all the 
tribe of sectional, water tube, and all the rest. Boiler 
makers must supply what people want, so they are not 
to blame. A boiler maker must not learn too much. It 
makes him unhappy. He cannot carry out his ideas in 
land boilers. High pressure may, and has modified prac- 
tice, but if I had my way I would establish by code two 
types of boilers — one marine and one for land, and hang 
every man who departed from them. Experiments in 
boilers have cost enough to pay the national debt of 
Russia, and what is the result? Except as to sustaining 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 13 

higher pressures, a boiler of forty years ago is just as 
good as one now — perhaps better." 

There is a bristly old Scotchman among 

our passengers who seldom says anything, but when he 
does "open out," as old Keyway used to call it, there 
generally is some fun. He seems to smoke nearly all the 
time,, seldom reads, and how he ever gathered up the 
stock o? information he has, is a wonder of the sixth 
power. He is a walking, or rather a smoking encyclo- 
paedia of the "science of things in general," or as the 
Professor used to say, of Gemeinlicliwissenscliaft. 

To-day we had in the smoking-room a harangue from 
one of those lunatics who conceive that the ancients knew 
all and more than we do at this day 2 and that their arts 
have been lost. "The lost arts," he kept repeating, 
while old Tweed, the Scotchman, was watching him and 
puffing. "The great pyramids," said the lecturer, 
"could not be reared in our time. The mighty agencies 
then brought to bear have passed away — have been lost." 

Tweed broke out upon him thus: "Are you an 
engineer, sir? No? Then how the deuce do you know 
the pyramids could not be built now ? "Who told you so, 
and how could you know it was true if somebody did 
tell you so ? A countryman of mine, you may have heard 
of, Mr. Rankine, says, 450 tons of coal would lift and 
place all the stones in the pyramids of Egypt. He knew 
this, and you don't know anything about it, and can't, 
because you have no knowledge of the science of the mat- 
ter. In 1856, Fontana, one of your old time engineers, 
raised an obelisk in Rome with 40 capstans, worked by 
960 men and 75 horses. In 1878, Mr. Dixon raised Cleo- 
patra's Needle ; in London, with four hydraulic lifting 
jacks, worked by four men. 



14 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

"You are like a Mr. Wendel Phillips, who used to go 
around lecturing on the 'Lost Arts' — making Damascus 
steel and the like — when he knew no more of the Arts 
than — you do. My friend, confine yourself to pure 
science; the nebulae of the planets, prehistoric man and 
barnacle geese, but don't fool with arts that are computa- 
ble, or anything that comes within the field of mathema- 
tics, unless you want to make an ass of yourself." We 
cheered the Scotchman, and I went off to hunt up my 
uncle to see what Tweed meant by "barnacle geese." 

He laughed and said, "Some one has been chaffing 
you. ' ' He had never heard of this kind of fowl, but next 
day, much to my comfort, some one asked Tweed what 
he meant by "barnacle geese." 

Here is his answer in "English." I wish I could give 
it in his vernacular, but I might as well try to write in 
Sanskrit. 

"Barnacle geese! I don't wonder you 

inquire. Accounts of these are written mostly in Latin. 
Did you ever see a barnacle 1 Most people think they are 
a little shellfish the size of a pea, and so they may be, 
but they are also as big as my thumb, sometimes ; housed 
in an open end shell, and have a beak that looks like the 
bill of a bird. This is where the myth began — the myth 
of 'barnacle geese,' that lasted 400 years. 

"These geese grew on trees over the water, or where 
the water touched the branches; they came out like a 
blossom. When they were old enough they dropped off 
into the water and swam away — what are you laughing 
at? 

"There are long essays in Latin on the nature and 
habits of these geese, and drawings too, showing them 
in different stages of their growth. They had some 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 15 

peculiar mark that distinguished them, and they brought 
a high price in the markets of the Latin cities, as I said, 
for four centuries. 

"Now we come to the point. The priests and the rich 
did not want to do without animal food during Lent. 
They longed for the 'flesh-pots,' and ate for the time 
'barnacle geese,' which were a 'vegetable product,' that 
grew on trees. Such a myth would have disgraced the 
Maoris, or Hottentots. It was reserved for our imme- 
diate ancestors." 

I would have been shocked at Tweed's remark about 
our ancestors if I had not just been reading some of 
Aristotle's Philosophy, and also a little before, Dr. 
Draper's critique of Lord Bacon's writings on the same 
subject. Barnacle geese are not so much of a "stretch" 
after all, but it is humiliating just the same, and per- 
haps a wholesome lesson for the student. 



CHAPTER III. 

A SMELL OF ERIN UP IN THE MAIL AT INCHICORE 

AXLE GREASE NEW NAMES FLATTENED OUT 

HOW TO SEE A CHANNEL STEAMER 

A LECTURE ON IRELAND. 

We are now nearing the land. This fact 

is emphasized by the "smell of turf," as Tweed calls it, 
Whether it is turf or not I do not know, but certainly 
there is a scent of burning hay or grass away out here, 
sixty miles from land. Every one is on the qui vive; 
there are four hours more to Queenstown where my 
uncle says we are to go ashore. The lies are growing 
thicker as we round the Irish Coast. The man from 



16 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 



Wisconsin is informed that the Martello Towers are re- 
mains of ancient Celtic castles. A lady near by learns 
these strange little structures are where the Druids 
offered up human sacrifices, and much more of the kind. 

We stop, not at Queenstown, but miles outside, and go 
ashore in a paddle-wheel tug, then go into a train, and 
in an hour are landed at a curious old hotel in Cork. 
How we got here and disposed of I do not know. My 
uncle is at home with everything, just as he would be in 
his engine room, no one takes him for a stranger. He 
gets what he wants with a sign or nod, fees are paid in 
silence, without dispute, and even the peddlers at Queens- 
town passed him by. I am in a maze but will "get on" 
by keeping a "close throttle," as my uncle says. 

I verily believe that if set down in this inn and left to 
my own resources, I would never have got anything to eat 
or drink, or even a place to sleep. The language, names, 
and customs are all mysteries to me. We "go up in the 
mail" to-morrow, which means we are going to Dublin 
by the express train. My uncle has some business there, 
or at Inchicore, which is a suburb of Dublin, and prom- 
ises me my first glimpse into a British machine shop. 

1 skip over the incidents of my trip on 

the Great Southern and Western Railway of Ireland, 
because I propose at some future time or place, in these 
notes, to describe railway travel in Europe, and from 
this, the first taste of it, I imagine there will be no lack 
of material. 

On the way up from Cork my uncle in reply to some 
questions of mine finally broke out in a monologue as 
follows: "You are just like all Americans, and nearly 
all other people for that matter. What you know or 
imagine respecting Ireland comes from the pictures of 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 17 

Paddy and his pig, and from peasant immigrants. Soon 
we will pass at Newry the first electric railway made 
in the United Kingdom. It is driven by water power 
and at the other end of this road seven miles away is the 
most orderly city in any English speaking land, Amer- 
ica included. There is no whiskey, no acting peace offi- 
cers even, and it stands at the top in what we are 
pleased to call civilization. At Dublin you will see the 
best conducted locomotive works in Britain; at Belfast, 
the best ship yard and stationery works. Irishmen 
command the army, are leaders at the bar, and Lord 
knows how many other things. The people are an 
anomaly, a mixture of the best and the worst, with no 
clue to lines of distinction. Keep your eyes open, also 
your ears, for in two hours more you will hear for the 
first time the true English language spoken. 

We are now at Inchicore. My uncle is in the offices, 
and I in charge of a "dark" looking through the 
works. At first I was astonished to see what seemed 
a precise counterpart to one of our own works at home, 
and in a short time was astonished at the differences. 
This seems a little Irish, as a proposition, but it is true. 
To begin with I never before saw a railway shop in such 
order, so clean and neat; a place for everything and 
everything in its place. The men looked intelligent, and 
were certainly so. They worked quietly and methodi- 
cally, and it was easy to see they were masters of their 
trade. 

The amount of wrought iron parts was astonishing, 
scarcely a casting to be seen; the forging was of a class 
I had never seen before, and a result of methods to be 
explained presently. 



18 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

The first thing to impress me was the chips, or shav- 
ings rather, because nearly all cutting was done with 
water and the shavings curled off in long pieces. The 
speed was slow, but the cuts were enormous. For short 
pieces, bolts and the like, slide-rests were moved by 
hand, and great shavings were peeled off at a rate that 
was never dreamed of at our little college laboratory. 
The sections were heavier for everything, or seemed so. 
The pieces in the lathes seemed to be in no case more 
than five diameters in length. In planing it was the 
same. The machines looked to me awkward but strong. 
There was no effort to "gig back" a carriage at a rate 
of 75 feet per minute, but this was more than made up 
as it went ahead. Nearly all tools were of the spring 
type, and the cutting — well, they simply took off what- 
ever was in the way. The massive frames of tools recalls 
some writing on the subject, read years ago. What it 
is I do not know, that causes a peculiar action in any 
tool with a massive frame and supports, drilling machines 
excepted. 

In passing around we came upon a large tank contain- 
ing at least a ton of yellow grease. It looked good 
enough to eat, "That is axle grease," said my guide. 
"It is nearly equal parts of palm oil, and tallow, and a 
sixth part or so of soda. The railways here mix up their 
OAvn 'grease' and call it by its true name, varying its 
hardness to suit the season. ' ' There is no use in trying to 
crowd in here one tenth of my notes, and I must have 
room for the "smithy," of which, next. 

Here everything seems to be made in dies, even weld- 
ing is done that way. Two blocks of cast iron fit to- 
gether, a matrix or form being cut or cast into their faces. 
These dies are joined in most cases by a bow frame of 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 19 

steel that springs enough to allow them to open and shut 
but keeps them in position to match. The blanks are put 
iato these dies, and they are pushed under one of the 
large steam hammers that comes down with a crash, and 
the metal is moulded into form like putty. The fin, that 
represents the surplus, is trimmed off and the job is done. 
I am told there is nowhere else in the country where this 
method is so extensively employed as at Inchicore, and 
one may well believe it. 

We visited the workingmen's dining rooms and stores, 
belonging to and managed by themselves, were told how 
medical attendance was provided, how their food and all 
supplies were obtained at wholesale prices, with a hun- 
dred other things and all of them new, and this in 
Ireland ! 

In the evening my uncle gave me a lesson 

on technical terms of which I make note. "Tech," said 
he, "mind what you call things here. It don't matter 
much, but what is the use of being provincial, besides you 
will find the names here, when they differ from yours, 
are more relevant. The railroads, as you call them, are 
railways here, and certainly they are not 'roads' any- 
where. A road is a different thing. Then, 'car' is not 
used, that is a contraction of carriage, and slangy, as 
all contractions are. 'Freight' they call 'goods.' You 
can freight a ship or a train with goods, but the goods 
are not called freight. A 'depot' is a place of storing or 
deposit, and has nothing to do with a 'station' where 
passenger traffic is carried on. The name is not used 
here at all in connection with railways. Never say 
'track' for the permanent way. It is convenient and 
short, but belongs elsewhere. It don't mean two iron 
rails laid on sleepers, but a mark or print of some- 



20 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 



thing that has passed. 'Baggage' is luggage, why 1 
don't know or don't care, one is as good as another and 
both absurd. 'Booking' is buying a ticket. We don't 
use the term in America, but have one in its place, 'buy 
a ticket' is its equivalent, but we do nothing of the 
kind, we buy transportation. 

"That will do for railway matters, except one general 
hint, which is, don't imagine what you have heretofore 
seen at home is correct, and all that differs from that 
is wrong in proportion. With that idea you are no 
traveler, and your time and passage money will be 
wasted. Just now you are an Englishman by courtesy, 
endowed with all their rights and privileges, and you 
should certainly concede them the privilege of knowing 
their own language, the one we call by that name." 

From a fine hotel in Sackville Street we 

went down, late at night, to go over to England in the 
mail steamer, a rakish looking boat with paddle wheels. 
I descended some water stairs at the end of the dock and 
got a look at her bow. It looked like the point of a 
dagger. When the mail came in from Queenstown, we 
left. Such a celerity of handling, getting ready, and 
getting away I never before saw or imagined. In a 
minute's time from "let go" we were moving rapidly 
out of the dock, and I noticed everyone making for 
below. My uncle passed me on his way down, and said 
with a peculiar smile, "Tech, keep hold of something, 
she may dive." 

I was holding to a chimney stay. An old "salt" in 
water proofs said "better go below, sir." I had no 
notion of the kind. For years I had been reading of 
these very boats that get fined about five dollars a min- 
ute for not coming in on time. Here was a chance to 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 21 

see the fun ; go below, not I. The first thing noticed was 
that the steamer did not "pitch," although going across 
the seas. She kept right on a level course, shot through 
wave after wave, each one flying higher and higher, but 
there was no thought of them ever reaching the high deck 
where I was. 

That was a mistake. There was a tremendous shock 
as if we had struck a rock, and the next thing I was 
pinned down on the deck like a postage stamp. It 
seemed to me there was a ton of water on my back. I 
was full of salt water inside and out 2 choked and satu- 
rated, and there was old "Tarpaulin" laughing at me, 
and repeating his cynical injunction, "better go below, 
sir. ' ' I went below then, and was taken in charge by a 
cabin steward who my uncle, as I afterwards found out, 
had bargained with to dry me out. 

It is not quite clear where the best point of view is for 
one of these channel mail steamers, but that it is on shore 
somewhere there is no doubt. They are amphibious, 
pay no attention to seas, go over them, through or 
under them just as the course determines, leaving a white 
streak behind. 



CHAPTER IV. 



GANG AWA' TILL NEW YORK THE EFFECT OF TWO TURNS A 

MINUTE BRITISH LOCOMOTIVES NEW LONDON. 

Speaking of steamers, I am reminded of 



a story told by Engineer Jones, the man of "beam 
engines" who was previously mentioned in these notes. 
Mr. Jones was not always a "beam engineer," he has 
seen salt service in various seas, antipodal and other- 



22 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 



wise, and carries the usual mess room quantity of 
anecdotes. 

One of these relates to an old Scotch engineer of the 
Collins and Cunard times 40 years or so ago. The 
engineer, whom we w T ill call McNab, was in the New 
York and Liverpool service, and had engaged an assistant 
in Liverpool who on the first night out, at the change 
of watch went to the "Chief's" cabin to ask if there 
were any special orders for the night watch. McNab 
thought a moment and then said, ' ' Mr. Blackie, ye '1 niver 
mind the mates the night, they are like cats and dinna 
like to get their feet wet. Go you out to the fore-deck 
yersell, and if there is not too much water comin over 
there, slap the coals in till her and let her gang awa' till 
New York." 

I think the story is true, it sounds so. 

Again respecting "water comin' over" I 

will relate some experience of my own sea travel. We 
were in a 5,000 ton vessel driving to windward and 
everything was wet up to the foreyard. The skipper 
in talking of the matter to some of the passengers said 
that two turns less per minute of the screw would stop 
the water from coming over. 

This seemed incredible, and, after some bantering, the 
captain, after asking us to count the revolutions, took 
out a card, scribbled a note and sent it below to the en- 
gineer on watch. The screw ran down from 68 to 66, 
and in half an hour the forecastle was dry. The water 
was stopped instantly. Of course at this day there is 
too much free board to ship spray, except in "tremend- 
ous driving ' ' to windward, but in the older ships it was a 
great discomfort because the spray turned to a kind 
of mist and came beyond the waist, or even to the after 
deck. 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 23 



-To get on land again. I have had my 



first good look at a typical English locomotive and I 
like it. I expected to be disappointed, and wonld have 
been, only that one of our professors had in his lectures 
so thoroughly imbued us with a hatred of machine orna- 
ment, that the English engine seemed natural and 
right. Nevertheless there seemed to be a section missing 
where the pilot, or in Western parlance, the ''cow- 
catcher" should be attached. 

There also seemed to be a great want of many other 
details as though the engine had been partially stripped 
in the round house and sent out without being ' ' dressed, ' ' 
but looking under it I found all that were required de- 
tails and nothing more. The solid end side rods that 
fought their way to our country after some years of use 
here, looked natural, but the driving wheels reminded 
me of a bicycle. The long slender spokes, sixteen in 
number, and the light weight of all was a miracle. 
There was seemingly not half the metal in this six foot 
wheel that we use in ours 2 five feet in diameter. The 
rule of this company is to paint or caseharden surfaces, 
no polish anywhere, not even on brass parts where there 
is no finishing required. 

I am watching these railway matters pretty closely 
and am trying to see things impartially, but one thing 
must be conceded now, and that is, that criticism of 
English locomotive practice is rather a dangerous kind 
of amusement for any one with a mechanical reputation 
at stake. I have read volumes in the form of letters 
and essays on English and American locomotives, and 
am going to look the matter up for myself. 

One more thing is certain, that is the speed at which 
the trains are drawn, We left Liverpool at 3 P. M., 



24 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 



and at 7.25 were landed at St. Pancreas, London, more 
than 200 miles away. In respect to speed, the run was* 
not exceptional, bnt in the regular service and time. 

Unprofessionally, perhaps, I must put in 

some notes here of "impressions in London," of which 
first and mainly is the evidence of wealth. Essays on 
the per capita wealth of this or that nation are well 
enough, but here you "see" the wealth. There are 
millions wherever you look. Why the St. Pancreas Sta- 
tion has cost enough to build and equip a considerable 
railway. 

The dry observations of a strange traveler have but 
little interest and less value. Their chief merit is con- 
fined to "impressions." I propose to have my Uncle 
furnish mainly whatever is to be set down for fact in 
these notes, and I will write out impressions. He is a 
Scotchman by trade, and is at home in Great Britain 
as well as many European and other countries where 
his vocation has called him. 

On the way to the hotel I remarked to him that there 
were no old buildings such as I expected to see. "Old," 
said he, "who told you London was old? It is old in 
years, but in no other sense. Why it is one of the new- 
est cities in the world; cities, I say, not a condensed 
aggregation of people. Population don't make a city. 
Pekin and Yeddo are not cities. It takes streets, public 
buildings, sewerage, municipal government, parks, hos- 
pitals, railways and a dozen more things to make a city. 
Nearly all the great buildings here are new. Twenty 
years has made a new London. 

"Then again London is not a city, but is a collection 
of cities, only one of which bears the name. The core, 
to so call it — one mile square — is the 'City,' and ninety- 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 25 

nine other square miles of area are separate towns or 
cities. The whole is governed by the Metropolitan 
Board, except the City — the square mile. That is a 
separate part which was once within the walls. All the 
rest were once villages around. We are now in Blooms- 
bury, one of these villages, that has a third of a million 
of people in it. 

"The streets you say are crooked, well wait a while 
and you may understand that even. There is scarcely 
a spot in London where if conveyed blindfolded, one 
cannot at a glance tell where they are. A city laid out 
like a checker board looks well on paper, mechanical in 
fact, and Satan himself would never learn to find his 
way about in it. In a month's time you go over this 
whole place of five millions population and find your 
way. Any one can, unless born here, which you may 
call a paradox for the present." I can't explain it, but 
that is no matter. A native never knows his own city 
so well as a stranger will learn it in a month. 



CHAPTER V. 



PENN AND MAUDSLAY LONDON PENNY BOATS SHIPBUILD- 
ING ON THE THAMES DRY LOAM. 

■■ 1 don't know what of London to set 



down first in these notes. The city is a world by itself, 
not only commercially and politically but "technically," 
and in an industrial sense. London machine works are 
accounted the best in the United Kingdom, and com- 
mand the highest price for their products. The great 
establishments of Penn and Maudslay, famous all over 
the world, are here. My uncle and I went down to 



26 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 



the Penn works, at Woolwich, to-day by the penny boat 
line, as it is called. The engines of the boat were made 
by the Penns, and were to me a curiosity, because of 
their arrangement. They were of the oscillating type, 
and astonishing because of the extreme lightness of the 
various parts. 

It is a common thing at home to hear of British 
clumsy work, and how everything in England is made 
heavy and unwieldy. One of the boys at college asked 
Professor Eisenschlager about this one time, and his 
answer was "Did you ever see a Coventry bicycle, that, 
of all machines ever made, has the least material and 
the narrowest factor of safety?" The factor of safety 
clause I conceded at once, having been pitched head- 
long into a stone pile that same day from one of these 
Coventry machines, but as a matter of fact there was a 
time, and a tolerably long time, in which a Coventry 
bicycle was the lightest machine in the world for its 
strength and purposes. 

The engines in the penny boats are much the same, 
even the crank shafts are worked down to correspond 
with the strains, tapered and swelled between the bear- 
ings. The connecting rods hitch overhead, the cylinders 
being directly beneath the shaft, and the cranks sweep- 
ing around so as to almost touch the pistol rod stuffing 
boxes. The air pump is worked from a crank in the 
center of the main shaft. The eccentrics are loose on 
the shaft and for reversing are thrown from one angle 
of advance to the other, coming up against stops each 
way. The valve movement I could not make out, it is a 
resultant of the eccentric's motion and also of the 
cylinder's oscillation, but one thing is sure, if the weight 
of the engines is divided by their horse power the quo- 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 27 

tient will be less than in any like machine I have ever 
seen before. 

The boats are about 100 feet long with 12 feet beam, 
made of thin steel, with feathering paddle wheels, and 
run 12 to 14 miles an hour. They are started, stopped 
and handled about, much as one would a canoe. It is 
wonderful, this river traffic, and if not managed well 
the whole fleet would be jammed and sunk in a week. 
It reminds one of the street driving here, and that re- 
minds one of eternity, that is, a person expects every 
moment to be smashed, but never is. 

We arrived at Woolwich, a suburb of London on the 
Surrey side of the river, nine miles away, and saw the 
outline of the great arsenal. A short walk back from 
the river brought us to Penn's works, John Penn & Son, 
where, as a rule, only government work is done now. I 
mean in marine engines, because the Scotch have car- 
ried off the hulls and merchant work, and the Thames 
knows it no more. 

My uncle explained this as we came down the river on 
the boat. "You see," said he, "these London workmen 
consider themselves worth more per day than those on 
the Clyde, and they are, when their skill can be brought 
to bear, but that will not do on a ship's hull where the 
measure of a man's performance is muscular rather than 
intellectual, but it will do in respect to making steam 
engines, as is proved by past and present circumstances. 
The engine work has remained here, and the best engines 
are made in London. 

"It is not twenty years ago when there were famous 
shipyards along the Thames here. Samuda and Dud- 
geon on the Isle of Dogs. The great yard at Blackwall, 
the Thames Company, Scott Russell's yard at Deptford, 



28 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

Perm's also, where we are now going, was a great ship- 
yard. It is all gone now, or nearly gone. Coal dues, 
local rates, taxes you call them, and other elements of 
cost, among them wages, became dearer here, and the 
industry had to move to the north where it is now, and 
where it will remain when your grandchildren read 
these notes you are making up. 

"I am not a prophet, a philosopher, or an economist, 
but have watched shipbuilding and other skilled indus- 
tries enough to know they settle where production is 
cheapest, and all the silly efforts of law makers and 
theorists to found industry on any other than the cir- 
cumstances of "cost" are not worth attention. That 
element of cost hardest to determine and last to under- 
stand is wages, and to rate this by the amount paid to 
men for their time is folly. The rate of wages is less 
on the Clyde than here, but that is no matter, the pro- 
duction of the wages is most likely in the same propor- 
tion. I think there is no great difference in this respect 
between the Thames and the Clyde, and there need not 
be. Other things I have named make up enough to move 
the industry, and it has gone — gone to stay." 

The first thing at Penn's that at- 
tracted my attention were the iron castings. I had seen 
a good many before but none like these. They reminded 
one of wooden "patterns" finished with steel colored 
paint. The surfaces were as flat, the corners as true, 
and the outline as perfect as woodwork could be made. 
I called my uncle's attention to this, remarking that 
the patterns must be good. "Patterns!" said he, "are 
not used, at least for anything you are looking at. They 
don't need patterns here, and don't cast in green sand 
anything except grate bars and the like." This I 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 29 

found to be true when I came to the foundry. The 
moulds were either loam work or dried by firing. Loam 
and "dry work" are done to some extent in all large 
foundries, but not to the extent it is carried out here, 
and I am just arriving at an understanding of its ob- 
jects. 

A cast iron part or structure "without inherent strains 
can be relied upon, but one cast of hot iron in green 
sand and ready to break because of cooling strains must 
be double the size to have any safety. This is the diffi- 
culty with steel castings, run from metal 500 degrees 
hotter than iron requires ; it is a treacherous material un- 
less annealed. Steel framing cost the owners of the ' ' City 
of Paris" a pretty sum, it is true, yet it is hard to see 
why merchant marine engine frames are not built up 
with wrought iron or steel struts and braces as they are 
in many war steamers. 



CHAPTER VI. 



A STEAM HAMMER FOR GRAVITY A STEAMBOAT ON A HILL. 

EXPLOSIVES ON THE PACIFIC COAST THE LINE OF 

LEAST RESISTANCE. 

Looking over the incidental part of these 

notes I find one or two old ones that will do to sandwich 
in here. The first relates to a Scotch engineer whom I 
met on the Pacific Coast, in San Francisco. A veritable 
type of that nation, of which Mr. Thiers, the French 
historian, said "there are only four millions of them, 
which is a God's blessing, for if there had been a few 
moro they would have ruled the world." 



30 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

I found out there, in California, a Scotchman who 
had, at an early day, taken out to that distant land one 
of "Jamie Nasmyth's steam hammers" to crush quartz 
with. It was got up with difficulty into the mountains, 
erected, and enclosed by a shed of one-inch boards. 
When ready, a large piece of quartz was put on the 
anvil, the ' ' tup ' ' raised, and a full head of steam turned 
on top. The result was surprising. The one-inch 
boards were riddled and the whole place scarred with 
flying quartz. Every one within range was more or less 
hurt by splinters or quartz, and the Scotchman, who 
now resides in San Francisco, came near being hung 
by the miners. 

Here is another story in my notes, that relates to an 
eccentric but able, mechanical engineer from Ayreshire, 
a relative of Bobby Burns, the poet. This man, in 1854, 
to secure cheap land went out on a hill in San Francisco, 
and started a machine shop there. It was driven by a 
windmill, and if any of the readers of these notes know 
that locality I need not say there was no lack of power. 

To prevent his anvils and other detached implements 
from being blown away he arranged his shop in a cellar, 
and did a good business. He, in common with all 
Scotchmen, had a weakness for steam craft, and set out, 
when opportunity served, to build a steamboat up there, 
300 feet above the bay, and built it accordingly. 

The boat was 40 feet long, 7 feet beam, and a pro- 
peller in type. When done, came the problem of 
launching the boat. A mile horizontally and 300 feet 
vertically was beyond any gradient Mr. Lochhead had 
previously dealt with, and he began treating with 
teamsters to haul the vessel to the water. Just here 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 31 

came an illustration of California methods, not quite 
abandoned out there at this day. 

One man thought $250 about the figure for hauling 
the boat to the water. Another said this was too much, 
he could do it for $200. A third said the thing was a 
swindle and $100 was enough. Lochhead was disgusted, 
and waiving contracts asked a friend of his to come up 
and haul the boat down at whatever the job was worth. 

The friend borrowed two long beams to go on his 
wagon, took out the coupling pole, and set the wheels 24 
feet apart. Lochhead had the vessel raised high enough 
to load, and in five hours she was in the bay. He then 
asked the teamster how much his charge would be, and 
the answer was five dollars not including "drinks," 
which he, the teamster, would pay out of that sum. 

This will be construed as a joke or per- 
haps a tough story, and might be either, but it is also 
true, and contains a moral larger than Lochhead 's boat; 
that is, we learn by experience, and know very little not 
acquired in that way. The man who wanted $250 to 
haul the boat thought, perhaps, it was worth that much, 
it would be no stretch of fancy to think so. But viewed 
in any way it is an example of what is called stupidity, 
and a parallel for another yarn of like ilk I heard out 
there, that involved another Scotchman. 

It relates to an old stamp mill in the mountains, that 
was being taken down to make way for a modern one. 
The stamp heads were huge masses of iron, with double 
stems in each, the cams working between the stems on 
cross tappets which embraced both. The stamp heads, 
stems and tappets were one mass of rust, and too heavy 
to handle without taking apart. Several men under- 
took this job by roasting the heads on fires, hammering 



32 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

with sledges, breaking drifts, and venting profanity. 

The stamp heads had keyways through them, along- 
side the stems, and as the keys were out a young Scotch- 
man then conceived an idea which he at once put into 
practice. While the men were at dinner he cut up 
some dynamite cartridges, and putting a quarter of one 
into each of the keyways fired them with a fuse. 
He "popped out" all of the old stems before the men 
returned from dinner, which amazed them and spoiled a 
week of work. 

1 found along here a number of ' ' notes ' ' 

from the same region, a good share of them connected 
with dynamite. Powder is not considered dangerous on 
the Pacific Coast. The people blow out holes to plant 
fruit trees, dig post holes for fences, and split their fire 
wood with dynamite cartridges. 

A well known engineer had a wharf to build, and 
some hundreds of old piles to pull out or saw off. After 
spending several days in sawing off a few of them, he 
lowered a dynamite cartridge to the top of the mud, 
about 15 feet below the surface of the water, fired it, 
and shaved off a pile as clean as a mower cuts a weed. 
This was fun for the boys. The engineer was called 
away for half a day, and when he returned the men had 
not only cut off all the old piles with dynamite, but were 
amusing themselves mowing down a new wharf. 

While on the subject of dynamite as a 

subaqueous agent, I will revert to some experiments 
made during the Civil War. Most people will remember 
how it was attempted to throw a wave over some sand 
forts at Charleston, and how General Butler undertook 
to blow up Fort Fisher with gunpowder placed 
"against" the walls. Neither attempt amounted to 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 33 

more than a waste of powder, and the development of 
ridicule. The War Department came to the conclusion 
a little science in the matter would be a proper ingre- 
dient in these gunpowder schemes, and detailed Gen. 
B. C. Tilghman, of Philadelphia, an able scientific man, 
to furnish some whys and wherefores in the case. 

The General's report was positive, curt and explicit, 
something like this, "The force of explosion follows the 
line of least resistance." This was ten words and 
enough, but had to be based on experiment ; so the Gen- 
eral put a bag of powder under an immense wooden 
beam of hard pine, bolted up solidly, sunk the whole 
twenty feet or so in the Schuylkill River, fired the 
charge, and found the powder had bored a sufficient 
hole up through the wood and left by the shortest route. 

The General's unprofessional explanation was laconic. 
"Where else should it go?" said he, "it certainly was 
not going 8000 miles through to the antipodes, and it 
was not going five or ten miles laterally through water 
and earth, so it came upward twenty feet, on the shortest 
line and the one of least resistance." 

Dynamite, if one is to believe half the stories con- 
cerning it, don't act that way, but this divergence has 
now covered five pages of my note book, and I must get 
back to London again. 



34 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 



CHAPTER VII. 

ISLE OF MAN MANX CATS PICKLED AT SEA KIPPERS 

LAXA WATER WHEEL PEARS ' SOAP. 

We are going over to the Isle of Man in 



a day or two. This principality, the land of cats with- 
out tails, the Manxmen's land, with a government of its 
own, is midway of the Irish Channel, four or five hours' 
run from Liverpool, independent of weather. 

Here is the itinerary, as the tourists call 

it : Went down by morning mail ; four-and-a-half 
hours from London^ 200 miles; and out to one of those 
paddle steamers, like the one I described some time ago — 
the Dublin one. May my shadow grow less if ever I go 
into another. It was blowing half a gale, which means 
a gale and a half ; anywhere outside the English or Irish 
Channels, and in one hour from starting there was salt 
water going down the smoke stack. It was an excursion 
boat, and a fine one, or intended to be. We had about 
a thousand passengers — half of them were seasick — 
piled up on the cabin floor, some places two deep. The 
air, or gases, coming up out of the hatches, could be seen 
and felt, so I stowed myself on the deck to the "leeward 
of the chimney," as the mate called it, and hung on by 
a stay rope. 

This gave the advantage of warm water, or hot water 
rather, because all that reached me had first been on the 
smoke pipe and came down at from 100 to 150 degrees. 
It was refreshing, but lasted too long, besides I was not 
accustomed to bathing with my clothes on. It was the 
intention to describe the behavior of the steamer, but 
not much of this was seen. It was felt, however, and 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 35 

until the contrary is known, I will contend that the bul- 
warks and freeboard of that boat were of India rubber. 
Iron, steel or wood could not have withstood the blows, 
twisting and hammering. We finally shot into the little 
harbor behind the breakwater at Douglas, a fine little 
city devoted to "kippers" or smoked herring. This I 
say because the main business there seems to be to catch 
and prepare these fish, also catching and preparing 
tourists. 

At Douglas my uncle emerged as dry as an Egyptian 
of Sorasis' time, with a perfume of tobacco and toddy 
about him — said he had been "chatting" with the chief, 
and as I discovered had been playing a joke on me. 
"Tech," said he, when we started, "the scenery in the 
channel is fine during brisk wind, but you seem to have 
been in the hot well. Enjoyed yourself, eh?" 

We drove to a fine hotel, the Castle something, that 
had a weird history, not worth recounting. My uncle 
had a huge fire built in a wide grate and I began dry- 
ing out my "environment," promoting evaporation with 
hot water and spirits inside. It was a place of comfort 
certainly, that grand old inn. 

My first observation was the people. Take the waiters 
in the hotel, men and women, and they would pass for 
the "top of society" in most parts of the world. I do 
not mean in manners, although that may perhaps be in- 
cluded, but in feature and general appearance. The 
Manx people are the finest looking race in Europe and 
are a "race," because they have been here for a thou- 
sand years with scarcely any admixture from the main- 
land. They resemble the Irish more than Scotch, be- 
cause mostly of dark complexion and, as before said, are 
wonderfully fine looking. 



36 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

The next morning, a beautiful one, we took a cab to 
the Laxa lead mines to see the great water wheel and 
the country. It is a distance of seven miles or so over 
roads that are perfect; winding around cliffs that de- 
scend sheer into the sea, which was then as smooth as a 
lake. One of the first, or rather several of the first 
things seen, were the veritable "Manx cats," and sure 
enough, without tails. Only a short stub ! There is no 
myth in the matter ; it is a straight story. 

We passed the Governor's house, and learned from 
the coachman a good deal of Manx affairs such as he 
could know, and that was no small amount. His in- 
formation, and a great deal besides from other sources, 
led to a belief that the Manx administration should be 
cut up in pieces, diffused as a leaven, in the affairs of 
more pretentious countries. One might well endure 
cats without the caudal appendage and eat "kippers" 
every morning, to gain 'the advantage of living under 
such a government as this seems to be. There are 
opinions as to policy and the effect of public measures, 
but venality, or want of honesty and capacity, none. 

The Laxa water wheel is to operate the pumps in one 
of the mines, or the system of mines here. It is more 
than sixty feet in diameter, and although not near so 
great in power as the Bur don wheel, at Troy, N. Y., is 
much more of a curiosity. 

The water is brought underground, in pipes, and rises 
in a circular tower of masonry to the top of the wheel, 
and then flows out in a spout at right angles to the tower. 
This tower can be ascended by a neat winding stair 
around the outside, and the "spout," which is covered 
and has a railing around it, furnishes a walk out over 
the wheel. 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 37 

On one end of the main shaft is a crank of ten feet 
radius to give a stroke of twenty feet. A long connec- 
tion of wood, iron trussed, reaches to the first of a series 
of links, also of wood, each about fifty feet long, that 
run on a railway at the ends. These links extend at 
least a quarter of a mile, and do not in that distance 
consume two per cent, in friction. From the ends of 
these the pump rods, bobs, etc., are the same as are em- 
ployed in other places. 

The wheel and its connections, including the water 
tower, seem to be set up in the air, even the tail race is 
an enclosed flume that conducts the spent water back 
to the tower where it passes underground again. 

Just here is a chance of some mechanical 

moralizing. Suppose that wheel, instead of being con- 
structed with arms and tie rods as light as a bicycle, 
had been a heavy, cumbrous affair of the utilitarian 
kind, and had been set down in a pit in the usual manner 
with an old box penstock and chute ; half its cost would 
have been saved, and what of that? No one would ever 
have gone out to see the wheel. The cab fares extracted 
from affluent travelers will each year fully pay the dif- 
ference, and as a large share of the community consider 
money thus earned a gain of wealth, it is much more 
legitimate and consistent than selling "Pears' soap," 
and much else that is invented to play on human credu- 
lity, and extract shekels from the unwary. 



38 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE SCIENCE OF WAGONS JAMS IN BROADWAY LONDON 

DRIVERS BUILDING CITIES. 

1 wonder if horse and wagon traffic will 



be technical enough to go into these notes? Wheel 
traffic is a tolerably extensive matter in human affairs; 
like some other great industries, has no literature, and it 
is time some attention was given to it. 

In a great city like this of London, and indeed, in all 
cities, the most prominent element is houses, next people, 
then horses and wagons. 

The houses have absorbed the highest human talent, 
engineering and architectural ; people have engrossed 
the greatest philosophical minds the world has produced, 
but the horses and wagons, third in rank, find no place 
in science, philosophy or ethics. 

The subject was thrust upon me here. Just think of 
the swarm of vehicles, goods and human beings crowded 
into this population of four and a half millions; think 
also that they are a shopkeeping, commercial people, and 
then again think of their traffic being carried on in nar- 
row streets, few in number and irregular in course. 

To explain this in some measure is my present task, 
and, as usual, my Uncle Camshaft had to be called in. I 
always consult him before setting down in these notes 
anything relating to a new subject, and I quote him as 
nearly as possible, except now and then an expletive of 
a non-technical nature. On street traffic he said : "Did 
you ever see a jam in Broadway, New York? If you did, 
then you have seen the most stupid thing imaginable, and 
one you cannot understand fully until you study the 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 39 

subject here in London. Jam in Broadway! Look at 
the Strand or Cheapside; look anywhere here, on the 
bridges even, and count the vehicles, or ask some one 
who has, it is all tabulated — 13 ? 000 cross London Bridge 
daily — and then compare with Broadway. There they 
meander without system and without control. Here 
they drive by a system that has rules as rigid as those 
on a man-'o-war. In the first place, you must remember 
that street traffic follows the same laws as liquids flow- 
ing in pipes. The width of a street represents the bore 
of the pipe, and the speed of the street traffic is the 
same as the flow per minute in the pipes. If you will 
observe in the streets you will see all the traffic moving 
about twice as fast as in New York, perhaps more than 
twice as fast. You will see four lines of vehicles; two 
each way; the inner lines at six to eight miles an hour; 
the outer or curbstone traffic, in two other lines at three 
to four miles an hour. You may see cabs and carts leave 
the inner or fast lines and wedge into the curb lines. 
That means they are going to stop somewhere near. 

"Put one of these Broadway jams into motion on this 
principle and the street would be cleared in five minutes. 
Jams occur here sometimes, but they amount to a 'slow- 
ing' of the traffic. No such thing is known as a chaotic 
mass of vehicles all trying to go somewhere — wherever 
they can get clearance for. There is no division of the 
traffic, 'crawlers' mix in with passenger service, and 
above all, heavy loads of merchandise right among the 
express traffic it may be called. 

"Just note down in that book of yours that driving is 
a science in London, also that it is a trade that must be 
learned, and you might also note down that this remark 
applies to no other city. Also keep in mind that people 



40 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

can cross a street in comparative safety here in the 
densest traffic. They cross, two lines going one way, 
then they come to a guard or refuge in the middle of the 
street, where they can stand in safety until an opening 
appears on the other side. Just imagine a person, a 
woman for example, finding her way to the middle of 
Broadway. What would she do next? Could not get 
back and could not go forward, and could not remain. 
The only chance is to fly. I have been there, and been 
trapped that way. It is not to be laughed at. 

1 ' There are thousands on thousands of foreigners here, 
from all nations, and in all classes of business, except 
driving. Just make a note of that too, and the first one 
you find driving, who is not an Englishman, call on me 
for a game dinner at Simpson's, or a 'spread' at the 
Criterion. ' ' 

I found since noting the above, that my uncle was 
correct, but that even making all his allowances, the 
traffic in London could never go through the streets if it 
were not relieved by the overhead and underground 
systems. Twenty-five millions or so of underground 
trips and fifty millions of overhead railway trips in one 
year relieves the street surfaces. 

Getting railways into, out of, and all 

over London, is one of the greatest engineering feats 
here. There are railway stations everywhere. One can- 
not get five hundred yards away from one in the dense 
portions, and when he reaches one he can go from there 
"anywhere." He can "book" to St. Petersburg, Alex- 
andria or Bombay. It is a wonderful system, far beyond 
any power of mine to describe or even to understand. 
But there is one thing I am beginning to understand 
very well, and that is that authorities here are on the 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 41 

look out for ability to design and direct these urban 
problems. The man who succeeds comes to the front; 
men like Sir Joseph Bazalgette, Sir John Fowler and 
others. Great engineers require no "pull" except 
talent, and are paid for that. 

I am also beginning to understand another thing, and 
that is that building cities is the most intricate and ex- 
tensive of all problems. It is several years since I heard 
my uncle venting his wrath on city builders. "You 
have/' said he, "little engineers and architects discuss- 
ing and contending about curbstones, sewers, and the 
effect of orders of architecture, but where is your science 
of cities? The whole plan an economy of one. Cities 
are built by accident, and the great fact in their devel- 
opment is the increase of land values^ and whose pocket 
the increment gets into. Cities were, in many respects, 
better built a thousand years ago than now, because 
not developed by commercial gain, but by governments. 
What does a merchant here or in New York care about 
the development of his street except his own house? 
Improvements bring rivals, and so long as his house 
is the best, he has no aim beyond. 

"The commercial and trading element never improved 
any city, and never will; that calls for something else. 
A purely mercantile city is always a purely disgraceful 
one. Commerce deals with gain, not public adornment 
and conveniences. Its principles are selfish, and in the 
nature of things, must be." 



42 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 



CHAPTER IX. 

DOCKS AT MILLWALL GOTHS AND VANDALS^A SCARCITY 

OF SOII, A HOTEL COMMANDER THE CURIOUS KALKE- 

LUNG A FIRE TO LAST TWENTY-FOUR HOURS — 

THE RED ANNEX. 

"Go down," said my uncle, "to the 



Millwall docks and see which of these Swedish steamers 
is best, and take passage to Gothenburg." This was to 
me delightful news. Not that I was tired of London, 
or had seen more than the crust of it, but because I felt 
that enough time had been wasted over a hopeless under- 
taking. The ' ' horizon widens as it approaches, ' ' so does 
this Babylon, and there is no way to know anything of it 
worth recounting, without living here for years. 

I had become expert enough in finding my way. That 
is easy in London, no matter where you want to go. 
Millwall docks are on the Isle of Dogs, at the east end, 
and where the Swedish steamers lie. There are 236 acres 
of these docks. Like all others they are locked; that is, 
the gates are opened at high water only. The tides here 
reach 19 feet sometimes, and there is no such thing as 
lying at a pier with that variation. 

I went down by boat and found two steamers nearly 
ready to sail, ar^d selected the best looking one, "booked" 
and went back to report. 

It costs two guineas for about 600 miles by this direct 
route, and three guineas via HulL, which is the mail, or 
main route by water. Of course, quick mail goes by land 
across the channel, through Belgium and Germany, but 
not much quicker. 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 43 



Next morning we went down to the docks by train 
to embark, and I soon found out that one does not learn 
all about sea travel in crossing the Atlantic. There were 
a good many queer things here. The saloon, or cabin 
steward was a "Mamselle," who had charge of all, and 
good charge it was. Everything was Swedish. Lan- 
guage, food, customs, and I will add, courtesy, which 
latter is a very plentiful commodity with these "Svensk" 
people. They have no such term as "Swedish," or 
Sweden. It is " Sverige ' ' for the country, and ' ' Svensk ' ' 
for the people. 

My uncle, who has seen much service in the German 
ocean, was in fine humor, and set out with a lecture on 
the country while we were waiting for the dock to open. 

"Now, Tech," said he, "you will enjoy for a time the 
relief of not watching your purse. It will be a curious 
sensation. There is no bargaining to do 2 and no cheat- 
ing, so long as you keep under that blue and yellow 
flag; neither will you be drowned. These skippers are 
the best in the world, and have to be. I just now said 
the water would be like a mill pond. So it will up to 
November, then the North Sea will be a boiling cauldron 
for four months. I have been nine days making this 
journey to Gothenburg, standing into the gale, going 
astern and then running under the land to 'lie to.' 
Nothing is put on these decks after November. It is the 
worst sea in the world in winter, unless it be the Baltic, 
and no one goes there in the winter. 

"This vessel is built of Swedish iron. Run her on a 
rock or iceberg and she will back out with three stems — 
one in the middle and one at each side where the plates 
have doubled in. Run her on the sand and she will lie 
there all winter. The spars and decks may K ~ ham- 



44 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

mered out of her ? but next spring they will shovel the 
sand out and pull her off with her frames, skin and 
main parts all in shape. Fact! Have known it so." 

We had a fine passage of 60 hours or so, and entered 
the mouth of the Gotha River early in the morning. I 
was "dumbfounded" at the appearance of the shores 
and went down to rout out my uncle. "See any stone 
or rock about," said he, "if so do not mind that, but 
look out for soil, and as soon as you see a hatful come 
and tell me." 

The mist was clearing away. On the port side lay the 
Fortress of Winga. Little islands all about, mainland 
on the starboard, but of earth not a spoonful. All 
granite — cold, gray granite. Down in the sea I could 
discern crags beneath us, how deep I do not know. The 
water was as clear as light. But the granite ! 

We entered a river — a fine, wide stream with a strong 
current, which I mistook for ebb tide, and in five miles 
more were alongside the granite piers of Gothenburg, 
pronounced here "Yetaborg. " 

In the land of the ' ' Goths and Vandals, ' ' 

the mother of nations, as the French say. Rome was 
conquered from here ; so was most everywhere else, in- 
cluding England at sundry times, and finally by Wil- 
liam, Duke of Normandy, another of this same lot. This 
seafaring, buccaneering, fighting people that had noth- 
ing to do and little to eat at home, led the world a 
merry dance for six centuries or more. They are the 
colonizing element, and have some part in many modern 
nations; they are the discoverers of the "majority," 
inventors of republican government, and of "brlinvin.'* 
I am, however, becoming non-technical. 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 45 

The craft about here are mainly steamers, and the 
commodities of trade seem to be mainly wood and iron. 
Thousands of tons of each of these, and one vessel for 
Japan, loading with matches! Yes, loading with 
matches, after stowing some tons of "Swedish-bar" at 
the bottom for ballast. 

This is the land of matches, utan svafvel eller sulfur 
(without phosphorous or sulphur). Matches made of 
birch, that do not poison or choke one; nice, light 
matches ' ' made to gauge ; ' ' boxes also, uniform through- 
out. There are 1,500 people in one match factory at 
Jonkoping, and a dozen more factories elsewhere. I well 
knew the matches before, and had seen them at home by 
thousands. The British could not imitate them, found 
their trade injured, and pursued their usual pacific and 
shrewd plan of "buying out the works." Bryant & 
May do not make now many matches in East London. 
They make them in Sweden, at Wennersborg, and else- 
where in the middle section. 

A good deal of this I heard from my uncle, who as 
usual knew all about everything we came across. ''The 
British idea of a match, ' ' said he, ' ' whatever that means 
as a name, is a good stout stick as long as your finger, 
with a knob of brimstone on the end that suffocates the 
users and kills the makers. The Swedes are chemists; 
also mechanics, and found that chlorate of potash was a 
better fulminate for that purpose. They make matches 
for the world and will continue to do so, just as they 
do some other things of the kind, if they do not choke 
their manufactures by some mistaken commercial polity. 
Why there is an armory here, inland 300 miles, making 
Springfield muskets the same as are made in Springfield, 
and with the same tools. I happen to know they have, 



46 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

just now, a large order from the Turkish government. 
They have a cannon factory, or an ordnance works, 400 
years old, at Finspong. I have seen it; and at Sandvik 
there was a Bessemer plant for steel about as soon as 
Sir Henry got his process perfected. Just sharpen that 
pencil of yours at both ends. I propose to fill up that 
book for some pages to come. 

"These large wooden buildings down along the river 
there, and one or two on the other side, are wood-work 
factories, where is made joiner work for London, Paris, 
Berlin — in short, for everywhere; also finished houses 
to be taken down, packed and set up again where wanted. 
You are thinking now of what is- called at home a plan- 
ing mill. Yes, in one sense, but with a difference. Go 
down there and you will find an architect's room. You 
will find a staff of complete draughtsmen. All the 
machines will be of the best — all the work too. There 
will be drawings there from Paris for house work, draw- 
ings from Hamburg, Vienna, Berlin, Stockholm — in fact, 
everywhere, and just outside, in that "red annex," on 
this side, you will find something with a wonderful 
meaning, not to be found in the world beside. You 
will want two pages for that." 

My uncle was serious. That "red annex" may require 
a page or two, but some other things first. "We went to 
the hotel and had a suite of rooms assigned to us — two 
large and one small one. The ceilings were about 16 feet 
high, otherwise everything French, or Franco-German 
in style. The hotel economy seemed to be on the co- 
operative plan. No one seemed to own or manage it, 
and the business of the house seemed to be done by the 
porter, who represented alike the guests and the hotel. 
He was interpreter, business agent, banker, and more — 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 47 

a general factotum. "Whether he ever slept, or if there 
were ''two of him," I could not make out. We had a 
fire made, and here goes another page on that matter: 

1 was absorbed in the fire making, but 

my uncle gave it no attention except to say, ' ' Tech, keep 
a weather eye on the 'kakelung, ' " pointing to what I 
thought was a cupboard. It was about thirty inches 
wide by two feet the other way, ten to twelve feet high, 
covered with fine porcelain plates, polished brass doors 
at the bottom, also at the sides. 

The girl who brought the wood opened the lower doors, 
disclosing a set of inner doors and a flue in the center 
about twelve inches square. In this she set the wood up 
on end until the flue was full, and then fired the lot, 
shut the brass doors and sat down to wait. 

In a few minutes the fire was roaring, and in fifteen 
minutes was burned out. The girl then closed all doors 
tight, and also a damper at the top, cutting off all 
draught. That act over, I looked up to my uncle for ex- 
planation. 

"You are wondering," said he, "where the effect is 
coming in. Just wait awhile, and while waiting imagine 
that bunch of wood burned in an American stove, or in 
an English grate. That wood contained a certain quan- 
tity of heat units. In our country they would all be out 
of the top of the chimney now. In this case they are all 
in the room yet, as you will see presently, and will re- 
main here, as you will find further on. What you are 
observing is concrete common sense, as you will con- 
clude some day. 

' ' The flue in that stove is 60 feet long. The heat from 
that fuel when it escaped was not more than 150 degrees, 
perhaps not that. You can hold your hand in the flue 



48 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

and there is a little door up there by the damper to see 
how hot the gases are by a thermometer. All the heat 
in that wood is in that stove. It will come out directly, 
and there will be a fair part of it left here tomorrow." 

On examination I found the porcelain plates warm 
at certain parts and warming elsewhere, and in one 
hour the whole room had a genial temperature. My uncle 
showed me how to stow my damp shoes in the side 
doors of the kakelung (lime-oven), and I am a convert. 
Let it be written down in the great record of human 
conceits, that the colder a country is, the less fuel is 
burned, and that in all these patent contrivances for 
heating and choking people, in which we excel, there is 
not one to compare with the common sense Swedish kake- 
lung. Heat here is a commodity, costs money, and is 
turned on like gas and water. The gauge of loss is ven- 
tilation. That too, is a commodity here in winter, I 
am told by my uncle; but our stay will not reach the 
cold period — at least, I hope not. Salt water frozen 
eleven feet deep may be a curious thing to see, but I 
can manage by reading about it. 

My uncle says he will give me a start around in the 
town, and then go out to an island place to seek some old 
friend of his, while I "do the town," as he calls it. It 
is not a big town, but it is the finest one I have ever 
seen in many ways. It is principally of granite, built 
on piles driven into a substratum of mud; canals of 
fresh water in the principal streets, and no mean houses 
at all. 

I am curious to know respecting that "red annex," 
with so much significance. There is something there 
of importance. My uncle does not joke about such 
things, but I have not the least idea of what he meant. 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 49 

-The Ked Annex, mentioned in my last 



notes, has been investigated, and instead of containing, 
as I supposed, some peculiar machinery, there was only 
a squad of boys, ranging from five to fifteen years of 
age. They were orphans, and I was not long in finding 
out what my uncle was hinting at. These boys are joint 
"wards" of the government and of the works with 
which their building is connected, and the scheme of 
their care and education is one worthy of the sagacity 
these northern nations have given evidence of in their 
social economy. 

The boys are taken by the government and domiciled 
in the Eed Annex, under a contract with the firm or 
company owning the factory. The factory furnishes 
buildings, heating and food. The government furnishes 
instruction, in the way of schooling, maintains discipline, 
and conducts the moral part. The works furnish im- 
plements and material for working, and the two go on 
together. 

The boys make toys, baskets, rugs out of pine shav- 
ings, and a hundred more small things of wood or 
iron that do not require much skill. There are forges, 
work benches and the usual paraphernalia of a shop, 
but mostly of a miniature kind. The food is plain, very 
plain, but wholesome and enough. The work is also 
plenty, and there is no idle time in this embryo shop. 
Discipline is kind, but like the laws of the Medes and 
Persians is inflexible. 

The main point of all, however, is a romantic one. 
The energy and success of all human efforts depend 
upon some end in view, some goal to be attained, and 
there is here such an object. Between the school and the 
works is a mysterious door through which the orphans 



50 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

after certain qualifications, pass on into the works and 
become full apprentices. To gain an entrance at this 
door is the dream of all. For that object no labor is 
too hard, no effort too great. The mysterious door is 
there in view, a perpetual talisman, and as a moral 
agent has more power than all the mottoes, maxims, 
lectures and the like that were ever invented. 

It is a fact there present within grasp, and meaus a 
great change of life, more privilege and elevation to 
a new sphere, in short, is, as my uncle claims the most 
ingenious educational expedient the world has ever in- 
vented. 

After passing the "Red Annex" and his term in the 
works, the boy or man goes out into the world an edu- 
cated mechanic, an independent man, to add to the work- 
ing force of the Nation. He has not, at any stage, been 
a charge upon the country that is, felt or worth con- 
sidering. He has not suffered from being an orphan, 
indeed the reverse in many cases. 

1 find here a wonderful number of things 

of a similar nature that could be written about, some of 
them technical, as will appear, but for the present will 
lay them aside. The factory was a curious one in many 
ways. The timber, which was all received as logs, was 
small, crooked, and such as would be called "culls" at 
home but out of it was made the most perfect joiner 
work that I had ever seen. The knots were like the 
spots on Joseph's coat, and in order to secure panels 
for doors, clear of knots, they had to be bored out with 
"bung saws" and cores driven in the holes. In sawing, 
the logs are not as with us guided by carriages, but are 
sawed with grain and shape, by gang saws with con- 
tinuous or roller feed. 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 51 

The board or plank, no matter how crooked when 
sawn, becomes straight when piled up and seasoned. 
The saws are thin, not more than twelve gauge. They 
run at high speed but as the feed is slow the sawing is 
smooth and accurate. All sawing of whatever kind, ex- 
cept, perhaps, scroll sawing, is done better than at home, 
with thinner saws, truer and fast enough. The finish- 
ing processes, that is, the joiner processes, I have made 
copious notes of and will write them out in due time. 

My uncle came in from Marstrand on 

a fine little steamer of the Swedish type, late in the 
evening, that is, late by the clock. The sun is no guide 
here as to time. He gets in about twenty hours of ser- 
vice above the horizon in this latitude, and a little fur- 
ther up, in Sweden, stays up all night for a few days 
in June. It seems queer to go out at 11 p. m. and sit 
down to read a newspaper. Marstrand is a kind of 
summer bathing place about twenty miles out in the 
"Skargord" (rock garden), as the Swedes call it. The 
whole coast for miles out to sea is sprinkled with rocks, 
the surface being about two-thirds water and one-third 
granite, and navigation here becomes an art. 

The little steamers are seen everywhere, taking the 
place of omnibuses with us. They are cheap, complete 
and ingenious, all of the screw type and built of iron, 
they are reversed with an eccentric that is mounted on 
a shell with a spiral key or feather that throws the 
eccentric forward or back about thirty degrees to the 
"angle of advance" each way, and the engines have 
less pieces than any reversing ones I have ever seen. 

My uncle was in fine humor when he came in, and 
busy contending with a Scotchman concerning drinking 
in Sweden, and laid down the facts about as follows: 



52 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

"There are no teetotal humbugs here, no horrid ex- 
amples printed on tracts, moral lectures and the rest, 
nothing of the kind, but, instead, a law that regulates 
the matter and forces the rum trade to be respectable. 
This country, like all other northern ones, has been 
cursed with drunkenness, especially among the peas- 
antry and the poor. Their liquors are usually only a 
remove from vitriol in strength, and the climate creates 
an appetite for alcohol as fuel. They fired up in a 
fearful way, up to and beyond human endurance. The 
surplus energy was not expended, as in Ireland, in 
cracking heads, or as in America by raising sheoL It 
produced joy first and then stupefaction. 

"The Government stepped in and took the liquor 
traffic in charge. You have heard of the 'Gothenburg 
Law.' That means that only responsible and respect- 
able people must sell liquor, and must sell it only in a 
respectable place, and if any one wants to drink they 
must do it in a respectable way. The least abuse or 
infraction of the law means a revocal of the license and 
some other person is appointed. 

"There are commissioners of some kind that have the 
whole matter in charge, and they keep it in charge. No 
liquor, no rows; no rows, no lawyers and police ma- 
chinery, why you can hang your coat on the bridge there 
and you will find it to-morrow morning just where you 
left it." 

The honesty of the people in these Scandinavian coun- 
tries, especially in the northern or inland regions, is 
a familiar theme with my uncle. He had, many a time 
before our coming here, told me of the absence of crime 
and absence of lawyers, which he seems to think are 
either a sequence or cause of disturbance. 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 53 

One of his "lectures/' which I noted down and which 
I expect to hear again, is in substance as follows : 

1 ' Lawyers, courts, contention, thievery, murder, crime 
and the rest, of which there is eternal preaching, teach- 
ing and scolding, is not the normal or natural state of 
people. Look at Gothenburg. You may walk until you 
are tired to hunt up a lawyer's sign. Never heard of 
but two there, and they have nothing to do in the way 
of criminal practice, except to defend foreign sailors. 
They have a prison there with about twenty convicts. 
No one gets in there unlesss they belong there, and no 
one gets out of there until the end of their sentence, 
unless to be buried, and most of them get buried. People 
don't fool with law here. That is a settled matter. It 
moves like the tides. You cannot go to law here if you 
want to in any civil case, but the first thing must be 
arbitration by a governmental or appointed commission 
of respectable citizens. These act like a court, less the 
humbuggery of one. There are no technicalities, habeas 
corpus and the rest, only common sense and finding out 
the facts. Nearly all disputes end here and there are 
no fees to pay. 

"Such an institution in England or America would 
save one third of the nation's revenue. They have to 
save it in Sweden, they have not got it to spend, and 
don't want to spend it in this way if they had. Some- 
times the Criminal Court in Gothenburg is not opened 
in a whole year, and this in a city of 75,000 people. 
Talk about civilization. Goths and Vandals ! better take 
lessons from them. They have hammered out Repub- 
lican Government, self denial and true courage into 
various people of the earth, and have still on hand a 
store of good qualities that may be imitated. ' ' 



54 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

I have found out since here that there is a good deal 
of affinity as well as mixture between the Scotch and 
Scandinavian people. They live on opposite and not 
distant sides of the North Sea, and once, or indeed many 
times, were "mixed up" in war matters. The Faroe, 
Shetland, and other islands have people mostly Scandi- 
navian in lineage, and the language is, I am told, a 
Norse patois, so my uncle has, no doubt, inherited some 
of his opinions of Northern nations. 

We went around to visit the Slojd 

school here in Gothenburg, and the name calls for a 
digression. The letter "j" in the word is not the grat- 
ing Latin or French one that sets one's teeth on edge, 
but is simply "i," long. They call it "i" and put a 
dot over it. When I say "i," don't understand that 
letter in our English tongue, which of all other letters 
is the most awkward to pronounce — a sound that is un- 
natural if not repulsive. I mean long "i," nonexistent 
as a sound, I believe, in any other language. This let- 
ter is "e" long in all tongues but our own, so "j" is 
simply "i," or "e" long in Swedish, and what it is 
for no one can find out. 

This explanation I make on behalf of those poor wits 
who make jokes on such names as "Bjornson, " which is 
spelled as rationally as "Smith" or "Jones." Bjorn 
is "bear," and Bjornson is the son of a bear, or of a 
man by the name of "Bear 2 " to be more exact. In 
order to understand this matter, one must keep in mind 
that Scandinavian etymology and syntax are rational 
and systematic, and English are neither. I could go on 
and show how "i" or "j" became metamorphosed into 
that saw-filing sound we give to the letter, but it is of 
no use, and what is of more interest to note is that 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 55 



Scandinavian names always, or nearly always, mean 
some natural object, such as mountains, rivers, streams, 
animals, and so on, while in Saxon lineage we have 
handicraft such as weaver, carpenter, smith, and the 
like. Scandinavian names are an interesting study, 
and will be found, in nearly all cases, to contain a 
"root" as above. Berg, (mountain) ; strom, (stream) ; 
lof, (leaf) ; orn, (eagle) ; ek, (oak), are examples. 

The alphabet contains twenty-eight letters, counting 
the modified vowels a, 6 and o. The latter is long o. 
These twenty-eight letters have one sound each, no 
more, no less, and where an assemblage of them makes 
up a word, one knows what to call that word, if they 
can pronounce it, which is by no means certain. 

Some years ago it was discovered that the letter "c" 
was superfluous in the Swedish language, as it is in 
English, and it was cast out. The academy of some- 
thing, at Stockholm, requested all writers and printers 
to omit this letter, and the thing was done. In America, 
or England, the people would at once have doubled the 
number, if such a request had been made. This useless 
letter "c ? " which has in English the sound of "k" and 
of "s" but no sound of its own, had smuggled itself into 
about fifty words of the Swedish language, taking the 
place of "k" at the beginning of words, in which con- 
nection only it was found. It is gone now in Sweden, 
and let us hope will be gone some day in English as well. 

Reverting to schools in Sweden, my own 

notes, while they may be in better diction, do not com- 
pare to my uncle's comments when he can be persuaded 
to talk. It seems this school matter has interested him 
in some way, at any rate he understands it, as will ap- 



56 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

pear from the following, jotted down from one of his 
impromptu ' ' lectures ' ' : 

"Schools?" said he. "Any one who visited the 
Vienna Exhibition, or any other exhibition for that 
matter, where there were school exhibits, will know what 
schools are in Sweden. Why, a child learns its letters 
and to spell in four languages all at the same time, and 
learns the whole mueh better than one and almost as 
easy. The girls learn to make their own clothes and 
to make bread, as well as the piano and deportment. 
At two in the afternoon they sing. Sing! I say, not 
'squawk.' Sing so that visitors come to hear the music, 
just as they would go to a concert. I am speaking of 
elementary schools now. At some hour in the day the 
boys are called out for l drill' in a gymnasium, by the 
'Ling' system they call it, after some man who con- 
nected calisthenics to science. There is no rough and 
tumble business, but strict drill, by an officer of the 
army usually, who is detailed for that purpose. It is 
a wonderful performance, better than a theatre, and 
of infinitely more use. I am not a schoolmaster, nor 
the custodian of boys, but I know a school when I see 
one, and they can be seen here. These people are 
housed in the winter in close rooms. Ventilation is 
estimated by the cubic foot; a foot of air and a foot of 
cold, they come in together, but, nevertheless, as you 
may see, the people are sturdy and strong. Besides the 
elementary schools, or the secular schools, there is in 
every town of any size a technological school, and filled 
up too. Take Jonkoping for example, an inland town, 
on Lake Wetter, with about ten thousand people. 
There is there a technical school or college equal to 
some of our best, so are there all over Sweden, and have 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 57 

to be. What are these people to do on this poor penin- 
sula that produces mainly granite, stunted pine trees 
and ice ; with a few cereals, such as rye and oats? The 
people must go 'outside' to hunt for a living, and to 
do this must know something. In former times they 
were driven out by law, that is, a large part of the boys 
were, who found the law congenial because it gave a 
kind of warrant for robbing the coasts of the English 
Channel and everywhere else they could reach with 
their boats. This kind of business and recreation being 
ended, they must have schools at this day, and then 
when they go out into the world they soon learn the 
practical part of what they have already the rudiments 
and theory. Those that learn trades here stay at home, 
and now-a-days very few but the peasants or poor 
farmers leave this country. By the way, it is a strange 
thing, and a fortunate one, too ? that the poorer a 
country is the stronger the people's attachment to it. 
This poor frozen land, with night twenty-one hours 
long in winter, and land that an American farmer 
would not think of cultivating, is to the Swedes home, 
and beautiful. Gamla Sverige is the refrain of their 
songs, the subject of their poems and traditions. The 
particular blessed spot of the earth." 

The foregoing, taken in all, is the 

longest and most moderate speech my uncle has made. 
It is owing to the somnolent environment of the coun- 
try. No one is in a hurry here. There is not quite as 
much "to-morrow" as with our Latin friends, but near 
it. To-morrow we start through the Gotha canal for 
Stockholm on one of the little iron steamers that run 
in that trade. There are about a hundred of them, and 
among these a dozen or more fine packets for passengers. 



58 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

At nine o'clock we cast off, and our 

little steamer began ascending the Gotha River, or a 
branch of it, because when we were fifteen to twenty 
miles out Ave came to a high hill, on which was an old 
castle in ruins, and on passing around that, came to 
where half of the river struck off in a northern direc- 
tion to the ocean by a shorter route. Some farther on 
we came to the first rapids and went through some 
locks, or "sluices" as they are called here. This fall is 
a small one, of only ten feet or so, but in an hour more 
we ran into a great pool overhung and darkened with 
timber, and resounding with a roar like Niagara. This 
was the foot of the Trollhatta (witch's hat), the greatest 
waterfall in Europe, where 80,000 cubic feet per second 
come tumbling over ledges for a height of 109 feet. 
The whole rapids are 5,000 feet long, but there is one 
clean jump at the head of 40 feet or more. It is a re- 
markable place. Wild, weird, noisy and grand will do 
as adjectives, but what astonished me most was to see 
our little steamer, which we had abandoned, slowly 
"climbing the hill" at a right angle to the river. We 
followed up the boat, fearing it might diverge off into 
the country, but it kept straight on, lift after lift, until 
it was 110 feet above the dark pool from which it 
started. We all clambered up the hill and on board 
again, and started in the first stretch of artificial cut, or 
canal proper. The whole of this great work of the 
sluices is not made in the usual way of built up ma- 
sonry. It is " carved out of the solid granite. ' ' 

Xow that we are in the real canal, I will explain 
something of it. It was not a very rapid work. They 
were 400 years in making it, or a part of it at the eastern 
or Baltic end. The western end, from Lake Wenner 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 59 

to the North Sea, was completed in 1800, or nearly 300 
years after the scheme was first considered, and after 
more than 100 years of actual work, some of which was 
lost, because there is a lot of unfinished cutting at Troll- 
hatta, up alongside the falls, that was abandoned. The 
canal may be called a series of links, or sections, con- 
necting lakes. Sweden is covered with lakes, and con- 
tains the two largest in Europe, Wenner and Wetter, 
through both of which the line of the canal passes. 

The extreme altitude attained is 300 feet, at Yiken. 
There are 74 locks, 37 on each side, and they are ' ' there 
to stay." Some of the work looks queer and primitive 
to modern eyes, but, for the time, was done as well as 
human knowledge would permit. Telford, the great 
English canal engineer, was, for a time, engaged on the 
work. There were, of course, many engineers. It 
takes quite a number to last out a 400-year job like that. 

It is 350 miles or so by canal from Gothenburg to 
Stockholm, which is 250 more than I inferred from the 
distances set down here. Swedish miles, contrary to the 
usual laws of expansion and contraction, have in this 
cold latitude lengthened out to six times our English 
one, a good thing to keep in mind when one is traveling 
here. The time is about three days in all, by steamer, 
and the trip is one of the most enjoyable that exists. 
The meals or food is in a measure a la carte, and you 
keep your own account in a book hung up for that pur- 
pose. At the end of the journey you foot up your own 
account, and pay the Mam'selle in charge. There is 
no cheating, or thought of cheating. There is no energy 
to waste on such things here. It is not agreeable. It 
don't pay, as we would say. The labor and anxiety of 
bargaining and watching to avoid cheating is a heavy 



60 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

load, and these people seem to escape it somehow, as 
my uncle has already explained. It would be a curious 
problem if we could- know just what part of human 
effort is directed to the avoidance of being cheated. It 
is a considerable part, and includes much more than we 
suppose. 

The money here is at first a little confusing, like the 
"reis" of Portugal, but when learned it is a very plain 
and sensible system. The unit is a "kroner," worth 
twenty-six cents of our money. This kroner is divided 
into 100 parts called "ore"; so that when one is in- 
formed that a cigar is fifty ore, the statement calls for 
surprise. There are little silver coins of five and ten 
ore, also copper coins of small value, but the main cur- 
rency is paper money of the most sensible kind I have 
ever seen. The bills of small denomination are about 
the size of a common letter envelope, 3 by 5 inches, and 
form a convenient pocket size. Their denomination is 
indicated by unmistakable marks, so there are no errors 
in counting. Larger bills are just double this size, so 
as to correspond when folded once. 

I had no trouble in paying accounts, for, as my uncle 
suggested, I hand over the money at hand and the 
creditor takes out what is coming to him and returns 
the rest. No one wants to cheat you. No one thinks of 
such a thing. 

This is the strangest navigation I have ever seen, and 
so remarked to my uncle as we were entering Lake 
Wetter. ' ' Strange, ' ' said he, ' ' you should be here some 
time when a squall comes down on this pot hole. Why 
it picks the water up and scatters it over the hill sides ! 
You will not see a boat on this lake, and scarcely a sail. 
They do not dare to have them. Away yonder in the 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 61 

distance yon can see Jonkoping. Ten thousand people 
there, and scarce a pleasure boat in the town. Jt is 
sure death to be caught 100 yards from the shore when 
a squall comes down. Comes down, I say, that is comes 
over the mountains down on the water, and sometimes 
strikes it flat, sometimes the other way, and at all inter- 
mediate angles. I have seen the canvas on a small boat 
out on the coast at Gothenburg, pulled away and stand- 
ing straight up in the air; here it is worse." 

I tried to think what was worse, and resolved never 
to do any boating on Lake Wetter. 



CHAPTER X. 

SWEDISH OMNIBUSES A BUSY KING WHO EARNS HIS 

SALARY HORIZONTAL SUNSHINE A LONDON STEAM- 
BOAT COMPANY TIN-POT STEAMERS. 

It was not the intention to set down in 



these notes any thing of the ordinary routine journal 
kind, such as one finds in books of travel, but it is hard 
to avoid the habit. It is true that one is bound to see 
things through the glasses of his own occupation and 
estimate them accordingly, but then again there is the 
opposing fact that one is apt to pride themselves most 
on that of which they know the least. A common news- 
paper correspondent is never so happy as when he dips 
into science and machinery to dish up some ludicrous 
blunder, so by parity of reasoning a mechanic will want 
to describe scenery, the morals and manners of a people, 
with other things of which he has made no study. My 
uncle is an exception to this in two ways. He is ready 
to consider almost anything, and has considered almost 



62 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

everything before, so I am proceeding vicariously in a 
great degree. 

In Stockholm we stayed at the Rydeberg Hotel. 
Other people, not Swedes, go to the Grand Hotel. We 
wanted to see Swedes while here, so lodged accordingly, 
and I find here, next following the hotel note, the fol- 
lowing set down from my uncle : 

"Stockholm," said he, "is a center of refined dissipa- 
tion, or, to be more exact, is a kind of large pleasure 
garden, open for four months in the summer. There is 
commerce here of course, and Government machinery 
of a very effective kind, but the people don't let either 
of these interfere with their pleasures during summer 
time. The city has the advantage of being half water, 
and the water has the advantage of being half fresh and 
half salt. That stream or current coming through 
under the great bridge there is fresh, poured out from 
a score of lakes reaching away back inland a hundred 
miles or more ; turn around and you are looking at salt 
water. The 'omnibuses' are driven by screws, made of 
Swedish iron, and are the cheapest, neatest steam- 
boats in the world. Look at the reversing gear when 
you are in one; the single eccentric is thrown to its 
angle of advance, each way, by a shell between the eccen- 
tric and the shaft, the shell having a spiral slot to turn 
the eccentric, and slides on a feather or spline in the 
shaft. The end of the sleeve is turned into collars or 
grooves that mesh into a pinion, and that is all. There 
is one piece where we use three, and no running joints 
that wear out. If you have room among your baggage 
you had better take one of these boats along, they cost 
here just a little more than the iron is worth by the ton 
in England or America. 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 63 

"There are parks, museums, palaces, hospitals, 
theaters, operas, pictures, and punch here. The opera 
is the finest in Europe, except in Italy. The palace, or 
Government house, is the largest in Europe. Stock- 
holm is the Paris of the north in respect to pleasure. 
Some factories here, one machine works of goodly size, 
but even these and other business seems to be done for 
amusement. 

"The King of Norway and Sweden lives over there 
in that immense building called the Palace; that is, has 
his rooms there and works there. Works, I say, because 
Oscar II has few subjects, except laborers, that do more 
work than he, and why not ? A rusty king is of no use. 
This one here will not become oxidized for want of use. 
To begin with he is the most learned man on a throne 
in Europe, or in the world for that matter. He is a scien- 
tific man, a linguist and scholar, a writer, painter and 
poet, and knows how hydraulic cement is made. I 
heard him lecture on the subject one time, and have not 
the least doubt of his ability to draw up plans for a 
bridge as well as for a state paper." 

Some days here has proved the cor- 
rectness of my uncle's "facts," and added a great 
many more, but the time of departure comes, and it has 
just been decided that we will not go to Cronstadt and 
St. Petersburg because it is too hot; just think of that 
at 59-20 North. It is not heat so much as glare. The 
sun does not get up overhead so as to be shielded with 
roofs, hats and umbrellas, but "comes on" horizontally 
— goes sweeping around the horizon, giving out an in- 
tense light and heat too that is insufferable to a stranger. 
You see 2 on the streets, hundreds of white and yellow 
umbrellas, carried with the stick pointing at the sun. 



64 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

They are worn as Sancho Panza did his front shield, 
and at the back, as he did his other shield, or pointed to 
the right or left. 

I got out of my uncle another of his lectures by ask- 
ing how we would travel from here and where go when 
we started. 

"I want/' said he, "to show you, while in this old 
country, some water service to stop your boasting of 
American steamboats. A steamboat and steamship are 
very different things remember. On rivers or inland 
waters, including even large lakes, you can build a first- 
class hotel on a vessel, but you can not send such a hotel 
to sea, so in comparing, here or anywhere, such service 
you must keep to deep water vessels, or the other kind. 

"We will go from here down the Baltic in a steamer, 
not exactly a deep sea steamer, but near it, and ; as I 
think, one of the best you will find in coast service in 
Europe. I don't know what steamer it will be, but the 
service all around here is good. 

"From Copenhagen to Christiana, from Christiana 
to Malmo and Lubeck, Stockholm to Baltic ports, indeed 
all around, you will find service that puts the Steam 
Navigation Company of London to shame. This latter 
Company that owns fifty or more steamers going around 
their own coast and to ports on the German Ocean are 
tubs in comparison to the steamers owned here. They 
carry hogs, cattle, sheep and passengers on the main 
deck, and are suitable for the quadruped part only. 
From Hamburg to London, for example, they have a 
way of contracting "to furnish food," well knowing 
that no one, not even an "old salt/' has stomach enough 
to eat on these steamers. They are worked commer- 
cially for gain, and with all possible disregard for pas- 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 65 

sengers. Here it is different, as you have seen thus far. 
It is more like the American service, which is the best 
in the world inland, and nearly nonexistant outland. 
The whole depends on competition. There is not a 
company in the world that would not carry passengers 
on scows and feed them on beans if there was a mo- 
nopoly of routes. Passengers on the water get decent 
treatment because Nature owns the highway. There 
are no franchises granted in the sea. 

"At the end of the American war, when the Swedes 
had but few vessels running to London, an English 
company put some blockade runners into the Gothen- 
burg trade. These steamers were of the "tin-pot" 
kind, made for one journey across the Atlantic, in the 
Summer, on the assumption that one load of cotton 
smuggled out would pay for the boat. These steamers 
kept on a little too late one year, got their decks cleaned 
off, including dirt and cattle, and were blown off toward 
Iceland. One of them, by burning up all her deck 
hamper for fuel, got to the leeward of the Shetland 
Islands, a mere chance and an only chance. The own- 
ing firm failed, as it ought to have done before. There 
are not many of these tin-pot steamers around these 
northern oceans now. All but the very best hibernate 
in the winter. 

' ' We often hear remarks condemning English builders 
for constructing cheap steamers. That is all nonsense, 
it is the owner who is to blame. We do not blame 
people for making swords, guns and torpedo boats, the 
avowed object of which is to kill people, not people who, 
as in the case of a bad steamer can keep out of her, but 
those who are marched up by force to be killed by such 
weapons. It is true the world has produced some men 



66 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

and firms who would not, under any circumstances, 
build a tin-pot steamer, but that was because by refus- 
ing they got more of the other kind to build. Compe- 
tition is what produces good steamers and good service 
by them." 



CHAPTER XI. 

ON DRAUGHTING SWEDISH METHODS EUROPEAN SHOP 

PRACTICE AN ENGLISH PLAN FOR FORGING SHEETS. 

HOW TO DRAW A DUMP CAR SWEDISH INK 

PALLETS LUBECK STEAMERS. 

The present is as good a place as I will 

find in these notes to set down some views on draught- 
ing that have come up since we landed in this older 
country. Here in Sweden especially, there are some 
points of interest to one who has worried for months to 
know just how machine drawings should be made ? as to 
the scheme, the amount of tinting, coloring and daub- 
ing that should not be employed, and out of it all, with 
some aid from my uncle, I have arrived at the conclu- 
sion, for one thing, that I know very little about the 
subject. Here in Sweden the drawings are the prin- 
cipal part of a thing to be made. The art is a congenial 
one to the modern Swede, who, very much unlike his 
ancestors, has become scholastic, wears gloves and 
glasses, and is effeminate. He is all the time speaking 
of his humble country, and all the time thinking it is 
the greatest country in the world, peopled with an 
exceptional race. I do not like to criticize in harsh 
lines a country and people, one of the best I ever hope 
to see, but, all the world has faults, and here there are 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 67 

the objections named of a tendency to scholastic pur- 
suits with a kind of contempt for the practical part of 
things. 

My uncle, who sees everything, and forms opinions 
about everything, says: "These Swedes of our day are 
an example of the reversal of extremes. People never 
stop half way, they slop over, so to speak. The de- 
scendants of those hard-headed old pirates that once 
gloried in privations and exposure, have gone to the 
other extreme and do not even have the manly games, 
such as hammering each other in the face, smashing 
their fingers at ball games, breaking their legs at foot- 
ball. They caper nimbly to the notes of a lute and 
would all be instantly smashed by Charles XII, if that 
old chap would turn out of his grave for a second 
term. ' ' 

This, however, has nothing to do with draughting, 
except the national trend is to do more draughting than 
hard work. It is well done — too well done, is a waste 
of time and has no application in construction, indeed 
rather the reverse. In England the art is strained the 
other way — is pure utility, and, as I believe, as nearly 
right as can be. They commonly use white paper, that 
is, paper that was white at first, pencil in the work and 
then trace the sheets in a clear manner and pile the 
original sheets away as lumber or destroy them. The 
lines are clear, in the right place, just enough of them, 
and no "mistakes." No one can describe what is meant 
further than to call it practical and sufficient. 

Here in Sweden it is common to work from a center 
line, each way, and not uncommon to "figure from a 
center line," that is give dimensions from the axis, 
which is a piece of super-refinement to bother workmen. 



68 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

Dimensions are laid down from the scale by measure- 
ment, and not made up as is common in England and 
America, mainly by computation. There is besides no 
commercial scheming of things to save expense, and 
as to time, that is not considered. 

The cost of construction, even at the low wages paid 
and long hours worked, is more than in America or 
England, and as the workmen seem pretty well skilled, 
I imagine that most of the prime cost account lodges in 
the draughting and counting rooms, where there is 
usually a force about equal to that in the shop. The 
methods are plodding, and as they say in England, are 
11 provincial," in so far as small implements and pro- 
cesses, but the work done is good, and I will say right 
here, that no bad work has been seen since we left home, 
except a little of what is called merchant work in Eng- 
land, and that is only rough — very rough. In Belgium, 
Sweden and Germany, indeed all over, there seems to 
be in iron fitting a tendency to extreme exactness and 
good finish. 

To continue the draughting matter. I remember a 
story of my uncle's, relating to a skilled draughtsman 
who found himself stranded "out west," and made ap- 
plication for work at a jobbing works he came across. 
He worked off a small sheet in his best style, and handed 
it in as an example. The firm owners were much 
pleased and astonished, but doubted if their people 
could understand such fine drawings, and so said. 
They had some dumping cars to make, and wanted a 
drawing for that. The applicant was equal to the oc- 
casion and said he would draw the work without charge. 
He went early in the morning, hunted up a web of 52 
in. Manila paper, borrowed a trestle board from the 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 69 

pattern maker, and a framing pencil from the carpenter. 
In an hour he had ready a drawing, full size, fearfully 
and wonderfully made ; figured with a blue pencil ! 

The carpenter would not wait until the owners ar- 
rived to inspect the drawing, but carried it off vie et 
armis, declaring it was the best drawing he had ever 
seen. The owners were much pleased and the tramp 
draughtsman was at once "installed." 

Between the first and second drawing there is a wide 
range of degree. Both extremes are right; so are the 
intermediate grades, and in finding out and adapting 
lies the skill that owners want in a draughting room. 
The professors taught us the higher method, and left us 
helpless' so far as pencil sketches on wrapping paper, a 
kind of drawings necessary in all machine works. 

In England they have a method of taking out forg- 
ings that commends itself. Some one handy with a pen 
sketches the forgings, free hand, or without much at- 
tention to scale, with copying ink. The sheets are then 
put into a book and press copied, the original sheets 
which are merely foolscap paper are sent to the 
"smithy." The drawings thus made look wonderfully 
well. The figuring is "writ loud" and very plain and 
to the "forging" size, instead of, as is common and also 
unreasonable, leaving a smith to allow for finishing. 
He is not supposed to be skilled in that matter, more- 
over does not know where pieces go, and should never 
be bothered with making out finish sizes from rough 
dimensions. I was much impressed with this method of 
laying out forgings, and believe it to be a great step in 
advance of the old forging sheets, and much cheaper, 
also more systematic. At a large works in England 
they let us examine one of the forging books. It was 



70 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

like a ledger, indexed, and in no case did the forgings 
for one machine require more than a page. There be- 
ing no scale followed, large pieces are condensed and 
small ones enlarged. The figures set all right, and such 
figures I had not seen before. They were in imitation 
of roman type and clear enough for — a blacksmith. 

In Sweden there was noticed a peculiar kind of ink 
dishes that call for notice. They consisted of a me- 
tallic box, pewter, I think, filled with red wax, and a 
curved glass dish, like the crystal of a watch, pressed 
down into the wax when it was soft. This makes a good 
strong job and wonderfully neat; but that is not the 
main point. When ink is to be made they breathe on 
the bottom of the dish to dampen it and then rub the 
ink without water until it is complete as a "paste," 
which is then thinned with water. One would think 
that under some conditions there would not be enough 
moisture from the breath, perhaps not, I describe what 
was seen. 

The steamer down the Baltic was all 

my uncle promised, and something more. The engines 
were new and wonderfully well made, the feathering 
paddles made no jar and could scarcely be heard. The 
boat was clean, swift and orderly. The food was good, 
or rather was everything wanted, except the "smorgos- 
bord" which is imperative in a Swedish meal. It 
means a kind of preliminary meal, eaten at a separate 
table, and consists of various odds and ends, such as 
anchovies, salted vegetables, caviare, hard bread, butter, 
bits of cold meat, and mainly a glass of "Branvin" 
(burning wiue) a kind of native brandy corresponding 
to German "Kummel. " It is a curious custom, easily 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 71 

learned, and has the distinction of a name for which 
no etymology could be found. 

We came to Liibeck in good time, and of this I will 
write farther on. 



CHAPTER XII. 

NAVIGATING IN A MEADOW HANSE TOWNS OLD CHURCHES 

AND RELICS AN IRREVERENT VIEW OLD COINS AND 

CABINET WARE HOLLAND AND THE DUTCH. 

When we got to the foot of the Baltic 



Ocean. I wonder why it is the "foot?" Our steamer 
was steered straight into a meadow ! Away ahead we 
could see the chimney of another steamer, crawling 
through the grass 2 and at intervals high poles or masts 
traveling along in the manner of a peripatetic telegraph 
line. The sight astonished me, "paralyzed" should be 
the term perhaps, but language is not quite so strong 
here in this matter of fact old motherland. I looked 
up my uncle for an explanation. "This," said he, 
"is not a case of running in a heavy dew, as Western 
American steamers are said to, it is only a lagoon, bayou, 
slough, or to be correct, is the mouth of the River Trave, 
which maintains a narrow channel out through its delta 
to the sea. That channel for twenty miles or so me- 
anders through the grass, or "tules" as they call them 
in California. Those masts you see are on boats, towed 
by horses, and the contrivance is to clear the towlines 
over the tops of the willows that are planted on the 
banks of the canal. It is all very simple you see, except 
the making of the delta and all other things of the kind 
that require some thousands, five to a hundred thousand 



72 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

years perhaps, to form. This thing of time, Tech, is a 
queer quantity, you don't know anything about time, 
that is, you have no conception not founded on years, 
a lifetime, or the period of history, in fact no one has, 
except a few scientific men who are for years buried 
in a fog of archaeology, but this has nothing to do with 
the river. We are heading sou '-west. In a few moments 
we will be over yonder heading north, then some other 
way and in an hour or so will come to Liibeck. It is one 
of the Hanse towns, a member of the Hanseatic League, 
famous in commercial history, and the subject of various 
lies as well as a great number of queer truths. You can 
read it up at your leisure, and believe as much as you 
please. Liibeck is a wonderful old town that always 
had an eye to business, down to a century or so ago. 
They loaned money to the Swedes, who were eternally 
at war with some of their neighbors, and of course bank- 
rupt. The Liibeckers exacted usurious interest with 
collateral security. Once they had a lien on the church 
bells in Sweden and took them too, bells were then of 
more value than at the present time. We can make a 
good one now-a-days for ten cents a pound, but in those 
days two or three hundred years ago, they put silver 
in their bells, and even if they did not, the alloys were 
worth nearly as much as silver. 

"Liibeck, after the Hanseatic League, went down as a 
commercial city. It is an inconvenient out-of-the-way 
place as a sea port; put there so the sea robbers could 
not reach it without some fighting on land, clearing 
away chains, dams and other obstructions for defense. 

"Twenty years ago there was good grazing for cows 
and goats in some of the streets there, but just now 
there is a new lease of commercial life. Liibeck is alive 
again. ' ' 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 73 

In time we came through the grass and up to the 
city, which is in fact a wonderful old place, very Ger- 
man, very comfortable looking, and fearfully old, to me 
at least. The churches or cathedrals here (I call all 
the large ones cathedrals) are of brick of great size, 
filled with relics, paintings and what not. 

I am much afraid of having caught from my uncle 
some of his irreverent ideas in respect to old churches. 
He says "he would not give a good clean white painted 
wooden church in America for the lot." "This old 
trumpery," he says, "is a co-efficient of superstition, 
harmless now, interesting and even sacred to many, but 
that is no reason I must see it in that light. There is an 
old chest, made of oak wool bound all over with iron 
bands, hob nails, rivets and so on. That chest contains 
valuables belonging to the church, and is itself a relic 
of much value, that is, value to those who value it, I 
would not give ten cents for the lot. The iron is worth 
a cent a pound as scrap, and the oak might make firewood 
enough to cook a dinner. That is my estimate, but I 
have no business to thrust my views of the matter on 
other people. I think, however, it will be safe to sug- 
gest to a young man like you to look upon the whole relic 
matter as a humbug. I have a crack brained relation 
who labors hard in a machine works to earn money 
which he pays away for old worm eaten cabinet ware. 
He is rich and derives pleasure from being thought a 
" connoiseur, " as the French say. Perhaps 1 am a 
little too utilitarian in these views, because there is to a 
mechanic, some pleasure in looking at an old machine — 
that old engine of Watt's, we saw in London, for ex- 
ample, but then an engine is a thing of practical use — a 
co-laborer with men and not the fancy of some old monk 



74 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

who never earned enough money to buy the salt in his 
porridge. 

"I have another friend who is a coin crank, and I 
sometimes look with compassion on his collection of 
badly made old chips — rough, hammered out, some of 
them, and worth just what the market quotations set 
down for the metal. He thinks they are old; yes, old 
for the Romans or even the Assyrians or Egyptians to 
make. For my part a modern coining press has more 
interest. By the way, just note down in that book of 
yours, the following proposition : Relic worship is com- 
monly affectation, and a substitute for other informa- 
tion, which the worshiper has not. He tries to hide his 
defects in a pretended knowledge and admiration for 
that which is shut -out from popular view and thus hides 
his own deficiencies." 

I cannot help in some degree subscribing to these icon- 
oclastic views of my Uncle, but their chief significance 
at this time is ? that our journey will not extend to any of 
the old countries, nor do I care ; that delta of the Trave 
has knocked the romance of age out of my head. When 
I want to see something old hereafter, a stone quarry 
will do. It will be of much more importance to cultivate 
some reasonable conception of the brief time mankind 
has been a tenant of this little planet of ours. 

There is some machine work done at Liibeck, some 
ships built, one now and then. Fine Baltic steamers go 
there. There are no fights, brawls ; no crime of any kind 
to speak of. The laws are supreme and the town is peace. 
A little Chicago — just a little — infused into Liibeck 
would improve it 2 and several large cargoes of Liibeck, 
sent over to "balance the trade," would much improve 
Chicago. 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 75 



-From here to Hamburg it is only a short 



way, and unless detained there too long I hope to per- 
suade my Uncle to go to Holland and Belgium before 
we return to England, to Holland anyhow, where I can 
realize some pleasure from again reading a favorite 
book of mine, Motley 's ' ' Rise of the Dutch Republic, ' ' — 
a kind of joke in this name, however, because Holland 
is not a republic, and certainly has not risen, at least 
not more than ten feet, and is the lowest inhabitable 
country known, one that has to be " pumped out" as my 
Uncle calls it. I hope to fill up sundry pages there, if 
we visit that country. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

A STUBBORN PEOPLE FRANCS AND FLORINS HOLLAND 

TAKEN BY THE DUTCH A RATIONAL BATTLE 

EMIGRANTS NEED NOT APPLY. 

We made our way from Lubeck to Rot- 



terdam, which, in many respects, is the principal "dam" 
in the Netherlands. How many there are no one can 
tell. The word is synonymous with our word "dam," 
and means a. water barrage in a river or estuary. Rot- 
terdam is at the mouth of the Rhine, or mouths of the 
Rhine as one may say, because it splits up like our 
Mississippi River. Rotterdam is a kind of commercial 
outpost of Germany, a place of landing goods for the 
Empire, and the wonder is that this Dutch country has 
not been somehow merged into the German Confedera- 
tion — then again perhaps not, when we come to read of 
the stiff-necked nature of these people, who have never 
been subjugated after an infinite amount of trying by 



76 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

great powers, notably by Spain in the wars of Philip II. 

It is curious to think of, and to know, the energy and 
indomitable spirit that has, in the past, characterized 
these people of Holland or the "hollow land," meaning 
also Netherlands, or " Nederlands, " the lower lands. 
The name is relevant, very much so, because a great deal 
of it is lower than the sea. In fact, a great deal of it 
was sea until "pumped out," as my Uncle says. 
Haarlem Meer, or the Sea of Harlem, was pumped out 
forty or fifty years ago. A portion of the Zuyder Zee 
(Cider Sea) has been recently pumped out, and in both 
cases a county or so gained. These pumping appliances 
of Holland are wonderful, both in number and extent, 
always of extreme simplicity and efficiency, and this is 
the principal engineering work of our day in Holland. 

In times past this country was a center of the mechanic 
arts. Peter the Great came here to learn ship building, 
and some industries have lasted until now, but none that 
require much power. Some of my Uncle's views here 
will be in place, and better than my own, at least more 
comprehensive. I have a note as follows: 

"Holland," said he, "is the queerest country in the 
world, or at least that part of the world we know. 
Somethings about it are unpleasant. It is a trading 
country, very rich, and the main business is to increase 
the number of florins. If you want to be 'skinned,' as 
we say at home, here is a good chance. We are staying 
at the 'Bible Hotel.' Just wait until the bill comes, no 
bible in that, but florins for this and florins for that. 
This insidious coin is worth forty cents, or a little more, 
just double the franc. Two hours from here, in Belgium, 
a franc will buy just as much as a florin does here. 
There are discounts, percentages and 'shaves' of one 



iSTOTES BY A STUDENT. 77 

kind or another for the stranger in every transaction. 
They live by percentage, and thrive on it. 

1 ' Then too, there is the cleanliness of which we hear so 
much. It is true, but not an inherent virtue. It is a 
forced one ? a struggle for existence. Keep clean or die 
is the rule. How do you suppose they sewer a city like 
this, for example? I will show you before we go away 
how they go "up" out of their houses to dump garbage 
into the sewers. It is scrub or die, as I said before. 

' ' The domestic or home economy of this country is the 
best in the world, and their external economy selfish — 
that of a trading community. Their management of Java 
is of the same kind we apply to lemons when compound- 
ing punch. They have famous tobacco and long pipes, 
and the care of these pipes is the first duty of the men 
here. I have seen a smith's striker with a long pipe, who 
divided his attention between the sledge and the pipe, 
with a large difference in favor of the latter. 

"The whole thing can be summed up by saying that 
modern Holland has learned enough to draw the main 
part of their living from their neighbors. Those that 
do work, work faithfully, and have to. It is like the 
cleanliness. When fighting the sea and abominable 
weather there is no chance of shirking. They build some 
steamers here for pure contrariness. They also had the 
audacity to make compound engines, good ones, too, 
forty years before the British began it. They are the 
stubbornest people in the world, and don't want anyone 
to agree with them. Washington Irving 's 'Knicker- 
bocker History' is no fancy picture of the Dutch at New 
York. If not true it ought to be, and I am afraid is the 
best picture of Dutch natural traits we have. They 
were never conquered. Romans, Northmen, Spaniards, 



78 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

and the rest who have tried it, soon looked up easier 
work; now there is little chance of it. 

"No nation except the Dutch could keep the water out 
of here. It has taken a thousand years to learn how, 
and never could have been done by any other people less 
stubborn. There is no timber, no iron, coal or other ele- 
ments of manufacture here, unless we count wind and 
water. The former answers in a way for power, and 
water is of little use on a dead level, but there is cheese 
and gin manufactured, and that reminds me of a toddy 
which must straightway be compounded." 

Out of this medley one may select a good many points 
"anent" Holland, as the Scotch say. There are many 
more, and I am fully prepared to believe the story of 
the Dutch judge, who decided a case between two mer- 
chants by "weighing" their account books, and finding 
them "equal," ruled that the books "balanced," and 
that the sheriff must pay the costs of the suit for bother- 
ing the court with such a case. It was the last case 
brought before that judge, no one even ventured into 
that court again. The court had peace, so did the people, 
and Solomon was excelled. I also think of the Dutch 
general who marched his forces against the Swedes who 
settled on the Delaware in our early times, and who, on 
arriving in front of the Swedish fort, found that his 
army was "out of beer." A truce was called while this 
beer matter was settled. The Dutch went into the fort 
to get beer with the Swedes, and after a time, when the 
canteens were replenished, and the two commanders were 
ready for battle, they found it impossible to separate 
the armies. They had become hopelessly mingled and 
confused by exchanging hats and otherwise, so that when 
the two sides were drawn up neither dared to fire for 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 79 

fear of killing friends on the other side. The dispute 
was then settled amicably by the generals, with no other 
aid than common sense and their pipes. It was the most 
logical campaign to be found in the history of the whole 
world, the only one that comports with common sense. 

There are no spread-eagle fireworks and jingoism in 
Holland. That went out with old Van Tromp's broom, 
which he hoisted at his masthead and sailed up and down 
the English Channel with, after "sweeping" out all 
opposing craft about there. The Dutch are educated 
beyond war, unless it would be to keep savages out of 
their country. There is no spirit of smashing someone 
for "glory," and in that lies a civilization beyond any 
other country at this day. 

There is no need of immigration laws here. "The 
Dutch have taken Holland" is an old saying, which 
admits of the qualification that no one else wants Hol- 
land, and no one else wants to go there. I imagine that 
no land is so free from "foreigners." Nature always 
provides some kind of compensating clause in her econ- 
omy. A salubrious country, without great heat or cold, 
is overrun with strangers seeking climate, emigrants 
flock there, and are usually not a desirable class. They 
are the high and low. The industrial middle class, who 
own and manage business, do not emigrate ; they have 
business at home. It is the speculative, the vicious, and 
undesirable generally, that form a great part of emigrat- 
ing people. They do not go to Holland, and never will. 
They cannot cope with the Dutch in any way, would be 
beaten at every turn, and starve, if they did not freeze 
or drown. 

One of the wonders of this country is 

"willow mattresses," not to sleep on, but to hold mud, 



80 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

and build up permanent works ? which there is no other 
material for. The plodding Dutchmen, while smoking, 
are always thinking and observing. They discovered 
centuries ago that Nature, in her grand schemes, had 
not neglected their country, but employed osier twigs 
and roots in embankments to retain water. When the 
Rhine is to be dammed or dyked, willow mattresses are 
sunk and mud piled on top, then harder material. The 
great dykes are made in the same manner, so are the 
common roads where they cross wet or reclaimed land. 
A row of mattresses is laid along, mud on top, then dry 
earth if any, and on top of all a good hard covering of 
shells, stone, asphalt, or something to withstand wear; 
when done there is both a road and a dyke ; not only these 
but a continuous wharf. The ditches at the side, where 
the mud is scooped out, become a canal, used for all the 
common purposes that our wagons are ; so we have a fine 
road, a water dyke, and a wharf all made at once, and 
not like our public works, with an eye to the next con- 
tractor, but there to stay for generations to come. 

Schools are perfect — education everywhere, charitable 
institutions the wonder of the world; peace, quietness 
and stubbornness. If I were a Dutchman I would live 
here, if not a Dutchman would not think of such a thing. 
"The Dutch have taken Holland." As Rip Van Winkle 
says, ' ' May they live long and prosper. ' ' 

From here we go by Flushing to 

England again, where sundry pages of my note book, 
filled up long ago, will find some place in these notes. 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 81 



CHAPTER XIV. 

LITTLE BELGE — THE GIANT ANTIGONUS — BRITISH FORTIFI- 
CATIONS — MONS MEG DOG TRACTION — A CITY 

SET ON A HILL. 

On the margin of my notes I find at this 

point a memorandum saying that my Uncle, who was 
called back to England for two or three days, left me to 
look at Belgium alone, which if not well done would have 
to be taken up and all gone over again on his return. 
This was a strain, of course. Here is the result. 

Belgium, because of its small limits, and 

being wedged in between greater countries, is but little 
known in proportion to its real claims as a State. Three 
cities, Brussels, Antwerp, and Ghent, together contain 
over a half million of population, one half being in 
Brussels. Two million chaldrons of coal and 160,000 
tons of iron are annually produced. Cloth weaving at 
Verviers occupies the labor of 4,000 men. One machine- 
making and iron-working establishment near Liege, the 
society Cockerill, employs over 15,000 men, and is the 
third largest in the world. The country is checkered 
over with railways, the system answering as a model for 
many countries who have tried to imitate it. All these 
things and many more are written down in official books, 
however, and we now pass to other matters. 

Antwerp, where the giant Antigonus stood watch over 
the Scheldt and exacted toll from passing vessels, owes 
its name to a peculiarity of this mythical personage, who 
cut off the hands of those who would not pay, and threw 
the hands out over the walls of his den, saying "where 
they light let there be a city." "Werpen" in low 



82 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

Dutch, or "Werfen" in German, is to throw, and 
' ' Antwerp " is " hand throw, ' ' but how the French make 
"An vers" out of it is not so clear. Not only in France, 
but in Belgium, this last is the name. Ghent becomes 
"Gand" in Belgium or France, and the traveller be- 
comes confused over these ; like the writer, when he was 
in ' ' Achen, ' ' inquired respecting Aixlachapelle ; worse 
things have been done, however. 

"How would you get along without speaking German, 
when in Belgium?" inquired a friend in America, where 
a considerable company were assembled. I waited some 
time before answering to see if anyone would correct 
him, and am yet convinced that everyone present 
thought Belgium was a German State. There is, how- 
ever, nothing German about Belgium; it was sliced off 
from Holland in 1830, because of incompatibility of 
temper and other purposes, a divorce of international 
policy, and as a country is French. French is the 
language of the educated, and in Brussels is spoken 
almost excusively, except among servants, who are for 
the most part Flemish. The Belgians are Celtic and 
Teutonic in origin, and may at this day, be called 
French, Flemish and Walloon. The aspect of the coun- 
try, the manners, customs and nearly all which a trav- 
eller sees differs but little from Normandy in France, 
and only from the whole north of France in a greater 
prosperity. Coal, iron and England made Belgium. 
England in acting as a factor, was true to her trading 
instincts ; there was an axe to grind somewhere ; disin- 
terested policy is not one of British peculiarities, and if 
she spends money, you may depend upon it, there is 
something to come out of it some way and some time. 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 83 

The traveller in approaching Antwerp from the coun- 
try is astonished to see two lines of fortifications of 
immense strength, one about 15 miles, the other, perhaps 
5 miles long, encircling the city. The outer line being 
a chain of strong earthworks, may not be noticed, but 
the inner line will be sure to be seen, and is not unoften 
thought to be a city wall, which it is indeed. Bomb 
proof dens, magazines, guns and all the infernal ma- 
chinery of war is hid away about these quiet looking 
grass-covered mounds, ready to be used at an hour's 
notice. 

My vis-a-vis at table-d'hote, was a major dressed in 
the neat and somewhat outre style of Belgian officers. 
I was introduced by the host, and as the officer spoke 
but little English, and I less French we managed to 
converse with difficulty, but this very fact, as is always 
the case, makes people communicative. They imagine 
what is told can not be repeated, because so imperfectly 
understood. One of my first questions was about the 
forts; "what are they for?" said I, "are the Belgians 
likely to attack one of their own cities? If the forts 
faced the Scheldt, I could see some purpose for them." 
The major hesitated, but finally leaned across the table 
and whispered very loud "Engleesh. " I stopped to 
think, and in a few minutes and without another ques- 
tion had what was then considered, and is now believed 
to be the meaning of this fortification of the landside of 
Antwerp, and I venture to here repeat the substance of 
my conjectures. 

Belgium is the continental out-post of Great Britain 
and answers the purpose which Calais once served, only 
in a more extended sense. Antwerp is the continental 
rendezvous for stores, ships, men and war material in 



84 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

case of war with Germany or France. In twenty-four 
hours an army can be moved from any part of England 
to Antwerp, and would at once be impregnably in- 
trenched behind these strong earth-works. Immense 
warehouses stand along the water apparently idle, but 
all these things have a purpose. English gold has, no 
doubt, erected the warehouses and paid for the forts. It 
is all part of one plan reaching back to the time 
Leopold of Saxe Coburg, Queen Victoria's uncle, was 
placed on the Belgian throne, but there is no fault in 
this if all is as conjectured, and it is only one more evi- 
dence of England's sagacity and foresight, which has 
brought nearly a quarter of the habitable globe under 
her control and given her sway over 325,000,000 people. 
Beige is the gainer. No right is abridged, no restraint 
imposed, and she has the whole military force of Britain 
to avail against aggressive measures on the part of Ger- 
many or France. 

Going from England to the Continent, Antwerp is 
one of the first cities where a stranger may see the street 
traffic, watched over by the Virgin. At every crossing 
of importance in the older parts of the city a Madonna 
will be seen perched up on one or the other of the four 
corners, often on two corners. She is commonly sym- 
metrical and brilliant in blue and gold, but sometimes 
crude and imperfect. The carvings are generally about 
life size, and of wood. 

Tapers are lighted around these images on fete days, 
and in some cases when the donor of the Madonna or 
the occupant of the house can afford it 2 one or more 
burners are kept up each night, answering the double 
purpose of improving the street lighting, which is bad, 
and calls the passers-by to a thought of the ever pres- 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 85 

ence of ' ' Him who watcheth over all. ' ' This old custom, 
which measured by modern standards and especially 
from a protestant point of view, seems ridiculous and 
idolatrous, is, in fact, no such thing. 

One who has risen at 5 o'clock on a winter morning 
in one of the cities of North France, Rouen, Amiens 
or Arras, and attended the churches to see hundreds 
kneeling on the cold stone floors, offering up their devo- 
tions, and then goes home to read through the morning 
papers and find that twenty-four hours had elapsed 
without a single offense warranting an arrest by the 
police, will be convinced that there are more ways than 
one of controlling and saving people from crime and 
disorder. 

Antwerp has many things of interest to be seen. The 
pictures in the museum are justly celebrated. The 
zoological gardens, although not so extensive as at Lon- 
don or Paris, have something about them which renders 
them more interesting than either of the latter, the 
selection is better or the classification and arrangement 
more complete, at any rate one will go to the zoological 
gardens at Antwerp and the next day will want to go 
again. At Hamburg there are many more animals, but 
one trip satisfies. 

Across the Scheldt, a mile distance, where a collection 
of wooden sheds stand on the bank, one can see the 
word ' ' Gand ' ' written up in giant letters ; this is the 
terminus of the railway connecting Antwerp with Ghent- 
Crossing on the ferry, and enduring a tedious ride of 
two and a half hours through the Pays de Waes, costing 
about one dollar, without anything of interest to see, 
will land a traveller in Ghent. Here there is a popula- 
tion of over 100,000; good hotels, good buildings and 



86 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

in some respects a resemblance to Brussels. Houses, 
which coming from England one would take to be the 
residence of a royal duke, turn out to be occupied as 
baker shops, barber shops ? groceries and the like. 

What is the reason that in England a peculiar plan 
of buildings was invented which we in America follow 
out, and why is it that in France, Germany, Sweden, 
or as we may say, in nearly the whole of Europe, houses 
are arranged about courts, and people live on "flats" 
as we call it ? I suppose there are good reasons for both 
plans. The query is, how is it that the two plans exist? 

Here in Ghent, a given area of ground and a given 
expenditure in building, will house and accommodate 
twice the number of people that a like space and invest- 
ment would in London or old New York. Everyone 
enjoys the satisfaction of living in a good house, which 
can be warmed at half the expense and no stairs to 
climb. The privacy is just the same as in detached 
houses. I have lived both ways and prefer flats in a 
continental house. The Scotch in both Edinburg and 
Glasgow build on the etage method, and the system may 
at some future time, say a hundred years from now, 
reach London. It will require about this length of time 
to introduce and harmonize a change of the kind in 
conservative England. 

Every one, at least every one in Eng- 
land or America has heard of or seen the celebrated 
"Mons Meg," that wonderful old wrought iron gun 
mounted at Edinburg Castle. A gun of 20 inches bore, 
built of staves and then covered with rings of wrought 
iron, a piece of work that would puzzle many of our 
modern gun makers to perform. This gun, supposed to 
have been constructed in Mons, Belgium, some centuries 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 87 

ago, stands as a proof how invention repeats itself. I 
had sat beside "Mons Meg" many a time ruminating. 
It was my pet antiquity; nothing seen abroad had the 
same interest, judge then of my surprise, not to say 
disgust, when in turning a corner in Ghent I found 
myself face to face or 3 more correctly speaking, face to 
muzzle with another "Mons Meg," an exact mate to 
its Edinburg sister, having so near as I could determine 
the same dimensions every way, only the present one is 
not fractured as the Scotch one is. This old relic which 
tells no mean story of the skil] and ingenuity of the 
Belgians at a period which is remote in the mechanic 
arts, stands in front of a kind of market-place on a sub- 
stantial frame. A glance in its cavernous depth showed 
a lot of children's playthings in the gloom at the bot- 
tom, a noble use of it. "The wolf shall lie down with 
the lamb." 

We have sacred authority for assuming that "a city 
set on a hill cannot be hid ; ' ' and certainly if this propo- 
sition is granted, Brussels is not likely to disappear from 
view. Perhaps no city in the world can with equal 
propriety, be described as "set on a hill." There are 
many cities on higher ground, even on mountain tops, 
but this is not what is meant. Brussels includes the 
hill, not only stands on, but surrounds a hill, and one 
of the steepest in the world to have streets running up 
and down its sides. This claim is made, with a full re- 
membrance of English Sheffield, and half a dozen undig- 
nified attempts to sit down and slide ; dating from my 
first trip down High Street in the city last named. The 
practicability of climbing the streets in Brussels, like 
many other human achievements, is a result of practice. 
A horse taken to Brussels from some level city could 



88 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

no more climb one of those streets leading up to the 
palace and park, than he could ascend a fireman's lad- 
der. It is learned by experience, and well learned too. 
for omnibuses filled with people are drawn up by three 
horses. Brussels is one of the most beautiful cities in 
Europe, and on the same assumption, of the world. 
This is stating it strongly, but is no more than giving an 
opinion which exists elsewhere than in Belgium. With 
one-fifth of the population Brussels rivals Paris in what 
may be termed attractiveness. The wealth of cities is as 
their extent, that is, the means to beautify and improve, 
is as the value of the ground, and this increases very 
regularly with the extent of the population. Ground 
has been sold in London at the rate of five millions of 
dollars for an acre ? and in certain parts of Paris is no 
doubt worth five to ten times as much as the most valu- 
able sites in Brussels. The beauty of Brussels is due to 
its romantic situation, the taste of a highly cultivated 
people, and to the great individual wealth of the citi- 
zens. Engineering science developed by vast manufac- 
turing and mining interests, and the great railway 
system, has among the Belgians attained a foremost 
place, and on this science, modified or controlled by a 
refined taste, depends the development of a city so far as 
those features which render it attractive and beautiful. 
The genius of Hausman aided by the highest engineer- 
ing skill, made modern Paris. The same causes are 
transforming London, bringing order out of chaos. 

The Metropolitan Underground Railway is one of 
those creations which owes its existence to exact science, 
an undertaking which appalls one whose knowledge of 
such things allows them to conceive of what was to be 
combated and overcome in constructing such a line. The 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 89 

railway system of Belgium was developed in the same 
manner; almost every line ? station or switch, is a part 
of one vast and perfect plan laid down at the beginning, 
and from which no important changes were made, be- 
cause of the high skill and scientific knowledge brought 
to bear in preparing the original scheme. 

To come down from railways to carts, 

and from science to an obscure branch of social econ- 
omy, I wish to record the fact that the Belgians know 
how to manage dogs. These favored animals, which 
are little more than an expensive nuisance in most 
countries, are in Brussels raised to the rank of co-labor- 
ers with mankind, and earn their own bread, and 
judging from the expression on their faces and from 
their conduct in general : I have not the least hesitation 
in asserting that a happier and better contented set 
of dogs do not exist. In Brussels street tradesmen and 
costermongers have dogs to assist them in pulling their 
carts, and the arrangement, aside from economic con- 
siderations, is a very perfect one. The dogs do not go 
in front but are directly under the carts, safe from 
danger in the crowded traffic and take up no room. The 
cart can be as readily handled and will turn around in 
a space just as short as though the dog was not there. 
At the rear are a pair of legs, which rest on the ground 
when the cart stops, after the manner of a wheel-bar- 
row; these legs are connected by a cross-stretcher, to 
which the dog is hitched with leather traces, which are 
long enough to allow him to walk directly under the 
axle. It is astonishing to see how they will manage 
when a heavy pull is to be performed. One may sum 
up all qualities of the equine tribe, that indicate reason- 
ing power, and the whole will not be worth a compari- 



90 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

son with these dogs. I have watched them for hours, 
climbed the hill alongside a cart to watch the dog and 
note his evident reasoning about the operation in which 
he was engaged. If he notices anything wrong, such 
as an obstruction before a wheel, he gives a bark to 
warn his master. When the cart stops, if tired, he in- 
stantly sits down or lies down to rest. If you go near 
the cart when his master is absent, the dog looks out to 
see what you want ; if anything is touched a growl warns 
you, or a loud bark recalls the tradesman. 

Bread, vegetables, milk, butcher meat, and so on are 
served by these dog carts and their number is legion. 
They correspond to the London costermongers and small 
tradesmen's carts except that a dog instead of a donkey 
is the propelling power. Dogs churn, pump water, and 
assist in many things besides pulling carts, and to a 
person who does not like dogs, it is a relief to visit 
Belgium and see that it is not their own fault if dogs 
are worthless, and that if men are foolish enough to give 
a share of their labor to support dogs, and will not even 
invite them to assist, no fault can be found. Miss 
McFlimsy's poodle, in actual outlay for provisions 
and attention costs $100 a year, one fourth of what 
some poor men earn at hard labor. Many a poor man 
where children are half -clothed and denied the comforts 
of life, divides his earnings with several worthless curs, 
who never earn a cent, and not unoften destroy much 
besides their food. They manage these things better in 
Belgium. 

Brussels is not all set on a hill, as might 

be inferred from what has been said in a former place, 
the newer and we may say the main part, is spread out 
over a plain. Cities built on hills have all been much 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 91 

changed by the modern railway system. Locomotives do 
not climb hills, and the result is that cities set on hills 
must come down to the locomotive. There are not a 
few cities that have been much changed from this cause, 
and Brussels is among the number. Business naturally 
gathers about the terminal or station of railways, and 
the accretion of population and buildings which follow 
upon the construction of a railway soon shifts the center 
of a city and gives rise to new interests, which change 
the complextion of everything. 

Now that I am coming towards the end 

of these European notes, so far as they have been shared 
with my friends and the public, and see before me, and 
with pleasure, a resumption of my studies and work in 
my own land, but, with a very different view of many 
things. 

I am now convinced that our progress in this world 
depends greatly, if not entirely, on what others know, 
do and think, and there is no longer a mystery to my 
mind in China's standing still for some thousands of 
years, with a wall of masonry on the Tartar side and a 
wall of bigotry on all sides. 

I find engineers, mechanics, and men, much the same 
everywhere, with like faculties, powers and traits and 
ha^e discarded my little gauge of personal prejudice 
for something I hope is more rational and true. 

My Uncle, who was always looked upon as a kind of 
fanatic, I find is after all only a sensible man, who with 
his duties as an engineer has been able to observe and 
cultivate his mind without prejudice, and in connection 
with people of various lands. I also begin to feel charit- 
able toward the professors when I consider the broader 
field on which their opinions were founded. 



9'Z NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

With these views I return to England, and here in 
London at the Castle and Falcon, the oldest city hotel, 
I sit ruminating over our relations, our environment, 
and our future, seeing in all a new phase, even the high- 
est, for that calling which chance has thrown in my 
way, and to which my humble efforts through life must 
be directed. My Uncle, too, has got into a reflective 
mood, because this is nearly the end of our journey, the 
end of it indeed, in so far as a return to English speak- 
ing people. The journey to New York is nothing; a 
six-days' imprisonment with comfortable quarters and 
a big ship to rummage over. 

I reminded my Uncle of a visit to Birmingham, Shef- 
field and Manchester, also Glasgow, set down in the 
original itinerary, to which he replied. "There are no 
secrets in British engineering, as soon as anyone discov- 
ers anything or improves anything, he straightway pre- 
pares a paper on the subject, and reads it before a 
learned society or sends it for publication There are 
bigots here as there are everywhere, but not many in 
our line of business^ and I see no reason for trailing over 
works in the cities you mention; however, we will go 
down by Birmingham and Manchester if you choose, 
and if T 'ou are very anxious, go over to some of the 
Scotch yards and see ships in construction, but it is of 
no i\se. Each ship has a blue book of specifications that 
Tr nu can buy, which contains more than you could see 
*< ' id inquire about in a month. Everyone is curious re- 
specting ship-building in England, and it is no wonder, 
the art has grown up here in a wonderful way, and will 
likely remain he^ because there is no chance to catch 
up in other countries. The British do not propose to 
stop and wait for that purpose. By the time the French, 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 93 

Germans, or Americans have ships laid down to match 
those built here there is a new model to work to, an 
advance in dimensions or otherwise, that sets up a new 
standard. 

"There is a deal of twaddle written and spoken about 
ship-building here and the causes that have promoted 
it. It is evolution, skill, and being let alone; some say 
cheap iron in England, but it does not matter where 
the iron comes from. As a matter of fact most of it is 
imported now, in the ore I mean. Look at the Clyde, 
where the winter days are about eight hours long, rain- 
ing a good share of the time and some days so dark that 
the ship yards have to be lighted with torches all the 
time, it is about the worst place for ship-building in the 
world, but they learned how to build ships by owning 
and working them, and do not mind a Scotch mist." 

We went down to Birmingham. What 

queer places the English select for cities ! It is a matter 
of accident. Birmingham is an accident. Set on hills, 
valleys, and all kinds of sidling ground. Its name too 
is an accident, Brumagen, it is called sometimes, but the 
name originally, was Borough Meecham, the Borough 
of Meecham. 

The things made here would require a book to enumer- 
ate, mostly of metal, such as pens, buttons, guns, jewelry, 
hardware and the like. There is not much science in the 
manufactures here but a great deal of ingenuity, skill 
empirically acquired. For example, there is a way of 
eliminating imperfect spots on gunbarrels by welding 
in the flaws or spots. This is done only by the "barrel 
v.-e.kiers. " No one else knows how or cares to learn. A 
double barrel gun is made in a score of places by differ- 
ent people, each performing their particular part. It 



94 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

is the old system, as we would say, the opposite of the 
factory system, with advantages and disadvantages, in 
both a social and a mechanical sense. It leads to indi- 
viduality, and that leads to a good many things desir- 
able, but it costs more. 

Of one thing there is no doubt. No people work 
harder than Englishmen. They work "with a will," 
and produce also. If not, how do they compete with 
their German, French, and Belgian brethren that are 
almost within sight across the channel, and no tax to 
keep their products out, the continental workmen re- 
ceiving about half as much wages? 

By the way, I have been watching this wages matter 
all along and find it is not the wages that governs work, 
but the work governs the wages, that is men are paid in 
proportion to what they do or produce, but that is no 
discovery, because how could it be otherwise 1 ? All sell 
in the same markets, and if the Belgians can hire a man 
for 75 cents a day, how can the English compete and 
pay $1.50 a day? This wages problem as commonly 
presented is bosh, it was better understood a hundred 
years ago than it is today. 

We went out to Soho where James Watt 

lived, or worked rather, because he lived and is buried 
at Handworth, about two miles away. James Watt & 
Co. now have a queer old shop at Soho, old in parts but 
not all over. In one section there are square cast-iron 
line shafts with long wooden drums nearly the whole 
length. In other parts all is modern. One old "grass- 
hopper" engine was "put down by Jamie himself" as 
the man in charge told us. He said his father who had 
managed the engine had put new brasses in her, but he 
did not know when, before he was born forty years ago. 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 95 

The sewage pumping engines at Pimlico, in London, 
were made at the works of James Watt & Co. — about 
as advanced practice as can be found at this day. 

The British copper pennies are coined here by con- 
tract, Mathew Bolton, James Watt's partner, undertook 
this coining of pennies about 100 years ago, and it has 
gone on since. Just alongside of James Watt & Co., 
are the famous works of Tangye Bros. 2 which we vis- 
ited, and is here set down, all things considered, as the 
most advanced works of the kind in the world. My 
Uncle, who knew the works well, said: "They 'manu- 
facture' engines here, others 'make' them. Tangye 
Bros, have built these works and made their money 
mainly by making American things and inventions, 
which were always paid for and acquired in a business 
manner. These methods you see here, which we call a 
division of labor, or the duplicating system, is an Ameri- 
can idea in such manufactures } but there is no chance 
to apply it on such a scale as this at home. We have 
no such market, and it seems, do not want any. These 
men have five hundred million of customers, when one 
country stops buying another begins. There are nearly 
one thousand engines finished and in process here, 
counting steam pumps. There is nothing strange in a 
shelf thirty feet long, covered with cross heads piled up 
four high, or a pile of connecting rods that reminds one 
of a cane shed in Louisiana. It is only in proportion 
to the market and a result of natural prices for material, 
grit, and confidence. These men are Quakers, from 
Cornwall, brought up to believe that they are the equals 
of any people, and have proved it. Put a tax of twenty- 
five per cent, on their iron and they would fail in a year. 
Their net profits don't begin to amount to half that 
much. ' ' 



96 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 



The social arrangements of the men. 

about 3,000 strong,* are a revelation to me. They are 
like a government, have all kinds of internal provisions 
like a country Medical attendance, books, insurance 
funds, and the like, are all provided for. The general 
manager, Mr. George Tangye is a kind of leader for 
them; lectures, advises, and meets with them not as a 
master, out of business hours, but as a citizen. The 
master part begins and ends with the bell. I am acquir- 
ing some rational insight of the British engineering 
trades and the elements of one kind or another that 
make up that vast interest. 

Manchester is a repetition, except that 

a finer grade of work is done, or rather the product is of 
articles demanding more precision. To comment upon 
industries here in an understandable way would add 
page after page to these notes which are now finished 
in so far as Europe is concerned. 



CHAPTER XV. 

ON A DOMESTIC TOUR KNICKERBOCKER DUTCH THE 

MEMBER FROM CHATAHOOGA AMERICAN RAILWAY 

CARRIAGES THE GENESSE. 

The transition, or translation it may be 

called, from the college to the shop, is the goal to which 
every student's aims and aspirations tend. The monot- 
ony of study, embracing extraneous things, and the play 
of the laboratory, are like the training at a barracks 
before an army goes to the front. Everything one learns 
or does has reference to this change, and the sulphurous 



*The Tangyes now employ about 6,000 men (1899). 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 97 

smells, grime, and noise of the shop become pleasant 
odors, ecstacy and music, for a time at least. 

I have had a little of both— good deal of the latter — 
and like both; the college because it is done with, and 
the shop because its labors and self-denial are congenial ; 
but there is a surfeit of all things, and a new trip with 
my Uncle is an agreeable respite, well earned too, by 
hard work, and some nips and contusions of manual and 
pedal members, so that a letter from New York, ' ■ giving 
instructions," was welcome and more. 

My Uncle, in his usual didactic style, says: 

"I want to start on a tour of observation next week 
and need you — don't know which way, and it don't mat- 
ter; will keep to the water as a medium of transporta- 
tion as much as possible. One is always cramped and 
disappointed by set plans for a journey. These belong 
to construction. Bring a two-foot rule; a short glass 
(ocular) ; some stout, rough clothes, and if not an inflic- 
tion, leave that everlasting note-book at home." 

The above constitutes the "introduction" down to 
our start on the Albany boat, a cool seat to windward, 
and a short lecture on the Dutch, growing out of the 
name "Hoboken" seen on the western side at starting. 

"The Dutch," said my Uncle, "were at first exasper- 
ated, then amused, and finally pleased by the raillery 
of Washington Irving in his 'Knickerbocker' History 
of New York. Stolidity and smoke, both of them are 
good in their place, and the former, if we call it con- 
servatism, is not a quality confined to the Dutch. Here 
abeam of where we sit is a steam engine driving this 
boat, becoming as antiquated as a Dutchman's breeches, 
sharp gables, and galliots were a century ago. I am 
not complaining of a plain beam engine, on its merits, 



98 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

so much as of its incongruity in modern practice. No 
Dutchman ever stuck to his long pipe with more tenacity 
than the Americans have to these low-pressure single- 
cylinder steamboat engines. The fact of their being 
knocked out at sea ? in one round, fifty years ago, did not 
have any effect, and while we may admire the ingenuity 
and skill that has maintained the beam engine on Ameri- 
can boats down to the present time, we must not forget 
that the same skill and energy, if it had been applied 
in other lines, as it now must be, might have set us ahead 
instead of behind the rest of the world. 

"High pressure, wide expansion, and machinery 
under decks is the rule, or will be. On the St. Lawrence, 
from Montreal to Quebec ? they have beam-engine boats, 
but the structure is of iron, under the roof, and other- 
wise a gainly improvement on the type we have here." 

This was a kind of revolutionary change of opinion 
for my Uncle, but he was right. Beam engines had 
many virtues, but their time is past. 

The Hudson is a grand river, wanting 

only in "lineal dimensions," as my Uncle calls it. "If 
this country," said he, "had any concerted and practical 
ideas except how to get office — had any patriotism not 
confounded with the Treasury Department, the Hudson 
would long ago have reached from Albany to Buffalo, 
or to Lake Ontario, or both. Steamboats should go from 
Duluth to New York, and will sometime, when we have 
ten thousand less legislators, and the member from Chat- 
ahooga is not obliged to use his energies in securing an 
appropriation for the improvement of Catahoola Creek, 
so a scow can get up to his town and bring out the potato 
crop. What is a trans-country waterway to him, whose 
interests lie at Chatahooga? What has he to do with 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 99 

Lakes Superior, Michigan, and Erie? He don't live 
there; besides, who can blame the member? He has 
not a neighbor or supporter who is not acting on the 
same principle, and cares as little for National matters, 
or any matter not in his environment. 

"There are a thousand objections to a centralized 
government, and nine hundred and ninety-nine in favor 
of it. These quantities being varied from one side to 
the other by the character of the people, or rather the 
prevalent sentiment in a community. Put it into an 
equation, and add to the popular government side, vir- 
tue and honesty^ the other member becomes minus, and 
is destroyed. Put there instead general selfishness and 
ignorance, and the popular government side is zero. 

"We are getting into a position where National under- 
takings,, or National anything, is impossible, except as 
political bargaining. There is very little National prop- 
erty of any kind ; except for military purposes, but there 
is private property with National attributes. You see 
that train there on the shore; that is private property, 
also the way and the land beneath it. So its owners will 
tell you, at least. Yet the company, or those who own 
the road, have or may exercise what our legal friends 
call ' eminent domain^ ' that is, condemn and take private 
property, at an appraisement, for their own use. There 
is not a court in the land that will not at once say that 
eminent domain can be exercised for public purposes 
only. How then is a railway private property? I am 
speaking of National matters and the chances of a canal 
from the Lakes to tide water. That the Government 
can make such a canal or one across the Isthmus of 
Darien, who doubts? Make them honestly and cheap, 



L.ofC 



100 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

but where will the member from Chatahooga, and his 
friends 'come in"? That is the problem." 

Waterways or canals are an old theme with my Uncle. 
One who has spent his life mainly on this element looks 
upon railways as upstart affairs, good enough for dry 
land and internal or home traffic, but only supplemen- 
tary in the commerce of the world 

If old Hendrick Hudson came up here 

in the summer it must have delighted his senses to have 
looked out upon a scene like the one now before us. It 
was just the same two hundred years ago. The little 
trimming and cutting done by human hands has not 
much changed things, and never will. What has taken 
the mighty forces of nature millions of years to work out 
cannot be much affected by man's puny powers in a 
century or two. Just over there a great charge of dyna- 
mite knocked off at one time a hundred thousand tons 
from the rocks, and the result is scarcely visible — a mere 
speck. 

The Hudson is done; no great changes will come in 
future, at least in the estuary portion, and that means 
nearly all, because when it becomes a veritable river, 
at Albany and Troy, it is not much of a stream, a coun- 
try river, so to speak, and only a drainway with rapids, 
pools, and even cataracts; its principal function being 
to drive saw and paper mills and the like. 

At Albany we took the train across the country, and 
across the best portion of it I have seen, to Buffalo. My 
Uncle, in searching for a place to stow his effects, be- 
came "cloudy," and I could see in his manner portent 
of a dissertation on railway methods. I knew he was no 
admirer of the very exceptional system in this country, 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 101 

and after we had crowded into a seat with about fifteen 
inches of room for each, he began : 

"Here," said he, "is a great box with cubic space 
enough in it to accommodate everyone, and not a place 
to stow your hat, even. People seated jam together, 
packed like sardines, half of them strangers in pairs; 
somebody just behind you looking down your shirt col- 
lar, and exhaling their breath around your head for 
second use in your own lungs, and then to be passed on 
to the next person. Twenty per cent, of the length of 
this train is made up with platforms and stairs to get 
up to the platform from the ground, and then one nar- 
row door for both entrance and exit. These platforms 
belong in the stations, not on the cars. What's the use 
of carrying tons of them with the train when they had 
just as well be in the stations? It is all an adaptation, 
and awkward; saves the company from the expense of 
providing platforms at the stations. It is the idea of 
the old road wagon continued, and this is why the doors 
are in the ends of the cars. 

"When traffic is dense,, as it was at Chicago during 
the exposition there, they were compelled to abandon 
this system and fit up their trains and stations as is 
done in other countries. Just wait until we reach a 
station and then watch the result of this platform 
method. ' ' 

I did so, and at Rochester saw all and more than my 
Uncle had claimed. A hundred or more persons wanted 
to get out, and another hundred or more wanted to get 
in. The forces met and chaos reigned. It required two 
and a half minutes to get from our seat to the platform, 
or floor of the station. The whole train could have been 



102 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

emptied and refilled at Chicago or on any European 
railway in thirty seconds. 

I am not quite patriotic enough to consider this a sen- 
sible system because it exists here. Time will change it, 
also will produce compartment cars, or those without a 
gangway down the center to accommodate peanut ven- 
ders; also will eliminate the commercial agent we call a 
"conductor," who comes around underway and causes 
you to hunt up and present a ticket as often as he 
chooses, generally every time the train stops at a princi- 
pal station. If some one gets on he must be hunted up 
among the other passengers to collect the fare. Once it 
seemed right, now it seems crude and awkward. 

Here at Rochester, the Genessee River 

tumbles over a cliff 2 and as my Uncle says, "becomes 
romantic." This^ he informs me caused the selection 
of this place for a city, because of the water power avail- 
able now employed for various manufacturing uses, es- 
pecially grinding grain. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

DEACON BARTON A CORPORATION WITH A SOUL A QUES- 
TIONABLE MILL SITE JUNIUS JUDSON A RACE PROB- 
LEM ELECTRIC TOWING SCHEMES AND CRIMES. 



On leaving Rochester, my uncle told a 

story, a very unusual proceeding for him, especially 
when the nature of the story is considered. I noted it 
down, briefly, as follows: 

"Old Deacon Barton, a man who could hardly live to 
do business in these times, began here at an early day, 
fifty years ago at least, to make edge tools for carpenters, 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 103 

coopers, and others. He was an ingenious, industrious, 
honest man, whose name you would find revered in 
memory like one of the old saints, if you were to inquire 
in Rochester now. He prospered, and after many years 
of toil and self-denial, had built up two factories; the 
upper one about the falls somewhere, and the other 
some distance down on the western side of the river. 

"His tools were made honestly, of good steel, prop- 
erly tempered, sold at a reasonable price, and 'war- 
ranted,' which meant that any faulty tool would be 
replaced, even if it were employed to tap turpentine 
trees in North Carolina. His name became a mark of 
good quality, and was known all over the country. But 
calamity came. The Genesee River got in an angry 
mood and washed the upper factory over the falls, into 
oblivion, with a good share, more than half, of Deacon 
Barton's hard-earned capital. 

"He had left, a good name, a wide trade connection, 
and the lower factory. A great struggle and some goods 
bought from other makers enabled him to fill his orders 
and hold the trade. The lower factory was increased, 
and when it was fitted up so as to produce the product 
of the annihilated one, there came a fire and swept the 
whole thing off the ground. Nothing remained but a 
bed of smoking coals — not a pound of anything useful; 
and now I come to the part of this story I want you to 
observe. 

"Away out in Ohio, then a pioneer Western State, 
was another tool-making works, a large and opulent 
company, composed of true men, as will appear. A 
meeting of the directors of this Ohio company was 
called; their mechanical manager was called in and in- 
structed to go at once to Rochester and render any 



104 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

assistance he could to Deacon Barton, and request him 
to send all his orders to the Ohio company, to be filled 
on his account, at a discount that exceeded the usual 
profits of trade ; also to send for any goods he required 
at Rochester, and for aid of any kind. 

"The foreman reached Rochester early in the morn- 
ing, next day, and went down to the ruins of the burned 
factory, yet smoking and hot in places. A tall old man, 
with bent form and gray hair, was walking around the 
black spot, a picture of despair, the only person there. 
The foreman asked him if this was the place where the 
Barton Tool Works were burned, and where Deacon 
Barton could be found? 'This is the place,' said the 
old man, 'and I am Mr. Barton.' 

"The foreman then told the story of his instructions, 
and the Deacon's head bowed lower and lower until the 
end; then, reaching out his hand to his visitor, it was 
seen that his face was covered with tears. He said, in 
a choking effort, 'I had given up, but I will try again.' 

"That day and the next plans were made for a new 
factory, and various other matters arranged. It was 
built and succeeded wonderfully and quickly, so the 
Deacon at the end of a long and useful life went out 
to rest in the cemetery at Rochester, without a debt, and 
without having ever owned a dishonest dollar or in- 
jured a fellow man. I was the man sent from Ohio." 

My uncle, at this point, like the venerable Deacon, 
was too full to add a comment on the changed spirit 
of our time, when the destruction of a competing works 
is too often regarded as good fortune for the rest. I 
knew what was in his mind, and could write it out here, 
but what would it avail? The place is or was familiar 
to my uncle, and he soon went on talking. 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 105 

"On reaching Rochester, a common re- 
mark to all strangers is: 'Here is where Sam Patch 
made his last leap.' Few living now ever heard of Sam 
Patch. He was a courageous mountebank, who jumped 
from high places into the water, and wound up by 
jumping into the pool below Genesee Falls, and never 
came up again. 

"There was formerly, forty years ago, and may be 
now, if we could see through the hoarding, a saw mill 
on the very brink of the falls, so near indeed that the 
log carriage when log timber was sawed, projected out 
beyond the end of the mill and over the boiling pool 
below. 

"I remember when quite a boy, and long before the 
falls were fenced in for cupidity's sake, lying down on 
that log carriage and waiting for the slow feed to work 
me out over the falls, looking down into the raging 
cauldron below, and imagining poor Sam Patch's 
ghostly eyes looking upward. I could not move, and 
had to wait for the sawyer to 'gig back' and then get 
off with a cold shiver down the spine, to run away and 
never see Genesee Falls again until now, and not even 
now, because they are, as we are informed, converted 
into a peep show at so much a head for the privilege to 
go behind the high fence. 

"Here was founded one of the important indus- 
tries peculiar to this country — the manufacture of steam 
engine governors, or regulators which is a better name, 
as a distinct article of trade. It is near forty years ago 
since Junius Judson began to make his regulators here 
and sell them to steam-engine makers all over the coun- 
try, much to their and his gain too, if he had let the 
lawyers alone. 



106 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

"I am doubtful if he ever knew the real points of 
his manufacture, because he spent most of his time in 
discussing law suits, and 'graduated openings,' meaning 
thereby the shape of the ends of balanced cylindrical 
valves used. These were trimmed off to form what he 
called a 'double ogee,' a thing that had no importance 
whatever. The real points were first and mainly an 
organized manufacture of a job requiring workman- 
ship far beyond the resources of any ordinary machine 
shop ; and second, the high speed and consequent high 
angle of the suspension links, or increase of centripetal 
force, required to operate the valves. 

"Previous to this, engine governors were made to 
swing around like children at a Maypole, and in a sedate 
manner that took no notice of a change of five per cent 
in the speed of an engine. Between these leisurely 
moving weights and the 'buterfly' valves, there was 
commonly a lever and a lot of loose-jointed tackle that 
would catch up after the engine had been diverging for 
some time toward a faster or slower gait. Judson al- 
tered all this, and the manufacture became permanent, 
as it should have done, and is now a wide and useful 
one. ' ' 

"Here," said my uncle, as we pulled 

out of the station at Rochester, "we begin a country 
worth observing. There are apple orchards without 
end, a veritable apple district, cheese making and high 
farming. The land is maintained here, and is one of 
the few places where it is maintained. Schools and 
colleges are as thick as grog shops in Paisley, and the 
people among the best, physically and mentally, in the 
whole country, but not quite as good as farther west 
and adjoining, in what is called the 'Western Reserve.' 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 107 

The name came from some kind of juggling about pro- 
prietorship and a concession from the State of Vir- 
ginia, that owned the land to the same extent that the 
prophet Mahomet did, but that don't matter now; what 
I was going to remark is that hereabout, and there- 
about especially, the New England emigrants came a 
century ago, and by drinking limestone water, working 
hard, and having a broad environment, their bones grew, 
their minds expanded, and their views broadened, until 
in the second or third generation they have become the 
best people on the continent, that is, they have in the 
highest degree industry, ingenuity, thrift, and educa- 
tion. 

"These lakes we are coming to, I am happy to say 
at a reasonable speed, are a wonderful factor in the 
affairs of this country. Only being found out, however, 
in these latter years. The iron, copper, and timber at 
the upper end of the chain, more than a thousand 
miles from here, has made their importance mainly, but 
there is also a wonderful commerce to supply the North- 
west — an empire of itself — and now it is proposed, as 
a parting stroke, to utilize the waters where they pour 
down at Niagara, 150 feet or more at a clean leap, to 
the level of Lake Ontario. 

"Of this latter matter, people over-estimate it. What 
is it but money saving, and not much of a saving at 
that? A concentration of manufactures at one place 
instead of many places. As an increment to permanent 
wealth such works are a good property, and the effect 
within the radius of possible distribution will be bene- 
ficial. Kemember, I am not disparaging the scheme at 
all but complaining of the extravagant and provincial 
remarks one hears about 'harnessing Niagara,' and the 



108 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

dawn of a commercial millennium. It may save some 
coal , and reduce the price of that, but the price of coal 
does not depend upon demand and supply, when we 
come to think of it. ' ' 

This view of the Niagara enterprise was new to me, 
and seemingly a mistaken one, but there are certainly 
some extensive social points to be considered in con- 
nection with concentrated and segregated manufactures. 
A diversity of pursuits seems to be an essential feature 
in the normal development of community, and manu- 
facturing towns confined to a single industry are not of 
the best among municipalities. 

We are now skirting along the Erie 

Canal, and I took the opportunity of getting my uncle's 
views of electrical propulsion for the canal traffic, know- 
ing that he had been considering the subject. He was, 
I imagine, about to speak of it, because he had been 
figuring for some time, and referred to his note-book as 
he went along. 

"This scheme," said he, "is what may be called a 
'slop over,' and has for its principal object a franchise 
of special privilege, with some kind of provision to get 
control of the canal traffic, and prevent the use of horses 
and steam engines. 

"The mechanical phases of the matter may not admit 
of solution at this time, but it is hard to see what the 
object is of generating power on shore and conveying 
it to a boat by a trolley wire; but they say 'we will get 
power from the falls.' Suppose they do; power is like 
potatoes, and will bring the market price no matter 
where it comes from, but the main thing is that water- 
craft of all kinds should be as the professors call it, 

'auto-mobile,' and the objection to mules is in the fact 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 109 

that mule power fails at the end of the tow path, as 
electric motors do at the end of the trolley wire. If 
accumulator batteries were possible in the case, and I 
do not see why they are not, then a boat might roam 
around at pleasure, but then comes the original query: 
why not generate the power on board? The limitations 
are, boats with a four-knot model, that cannot be ex- 
pedited with an electro motor, or any other means, and 
a waterway that will not stand the 'swash' of more 
speed without damage. It is not a problem of power 
at all, and much less the kind of power, but of various 
other things, including an electric franchise. 

"Governor Flower, who being a lawyer and a banker 
must know all about engineering matters, started this 
thing in a rhetorical section of his message last year, 
and is now one of the company proposing to use electric 
apparatus. I don't believe in it. Am sorry that I can- 
not, but there are so many who do, my opinion cannot 
matter much. There are two kinds of progress in the 
world, physical and moral, and it is about time that the 
physical part came to anchor until the moral part 
catches up. 

"Powerful navies, flying machines, canals in Central 
America, and a tunnel under the Straits of Dover, six 
railways across the American continent, and fifty-mil- 
lion exhibitions seem mixed up with strikes, disorder, 
and an increase of crime, especially stealing. I can well 
mind when a certain penitentiary had 600 inmates. Xow 
it has 2,600, and another thousand should be there that 
would have been convicted and sentenced if tried at the 
time when the 600 were in prison, so the proportion is 
six to one. Strikes, turmoil, corruption, discontent, 



110 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

socialism, and the rest, are the product of physical 
change too rapid for social adaptation. 

"This seems a long way from an electric canal, but 
there is a connection." 



CHAPTER XVII. 

LA SALLE *S TRIP NAPOLEON ANNIHILATED ST. AN- 
THONY 'S FALLS CATCHING PICKEREL A FISHY 

STORY ACCLIMATING FRUIT OTHER THINGS. 



Hereabout, in 1681, La Salle crossed the 

lakes with his expedition to find out where the Missis- 
sippi River went to. Crossed but did not take to land 
as we believe, because it was a water expedition. He 
headed for the Illinois River, going to land somewhere 
near where Chicago or Milwaukee now stands. Twenty- 
three Frenchmen and eighteen Indians with canoes, 
guns, pemmican and various tackle of the frontier kind. 

It was in the winter, and on reaching the Illinois 
River, they "walked" on the ice down to Peoria or 
thereabout, dragging their boats, and then paddled on 
until they came to Chickasaw Bluffs, and made at the 
Mississippi a camp, or "fort" then called, and named 
it "Prudhomme. " Then again on and on, paddling 
with a current running 100 miles in twenty-four hours, 
the weather getting warmer and spring coming in Feb- 
ruary, until they came safely to the mouth of the Ar- 
kansas River, where Napoleon, a considerable city, since 
stood. Here the Frenchmen went ashore and acquired 
a whole Dominion by setting up a pole with the arms 
of France on it, the greatest "steal" that the world 
has ever seen since the time of Alexander the Great. 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. Ill 

Napoleon is gone now. The Mississippi made a swerve 
around that way and disintegrated the town, pulverized 
the substructure, inverting the superstructures, and 
moved the whole down to the gulf, perhaps in the 
eternal fitness of things to blot out the theft by the 
Frenchmen. The circumstance of the conquest is thus 
described in flowery words by Parkman the historian : 

"On that day, the realm of France received on parch- 
ment a stupendous accession. The fertile plains of 
Texas; the vast basin of the Mississippi from its frozen 
northern springs, to the sultry bowers of the gulf ; from 
the woody ridges of the Alleghanies to the bare peaks 
of the Rocky Mountains — a region of savannas and 
forests, sun-cracked deserts, and grassy prairies, watered 
by a thousand rivers, ranged by a thousand warlike 
tribes, passed beneath the sceptre of the Sultan of Ver- 
sailles, and all by virtue of a feeble human voice in- 
audible at half a mile." 

Who can say after that there is no poetry in history, 
and that Buckle does not deserve eternal infamy for 
reducing history to a science? 

We took boat at Buffalo and here for 

the first time I inquired about my uncle's plans. He 
paid the bills, and I as a guest had no further privilege 
as to course and object than to inquire. 

"We are going to New Orleans," said he, "if money, 
patience and health hold out. I came around this way 
to show you two systems of inland navigation as differ- 
ent as chalk is from cheese. One written about, photo- 
graphed* engraved until every woman and child in the 
land understands it — a system rising by evolution all 
the time onward. I mean lake commerce, or boats 
rather. The other, like Shakespeare's 'Seven Ages/ 



112 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

with a youth, boyhood, manhood, decline and fall. I 
mean the river boats and the commerce on them. The 
first, you can see and read about, and that note-book 
you may as well hang up for the present. No one will 
care for any opinions of yours on lake matters. They 
don't require your views or mine, besides you will need 
all your paper and energies further on. 

"This steamer is typical of the whole lot, perfect in 
all appointments, including an opinion of every one 
on board, that it is the finest service in the world, and 
it may be, at least ought to be. A grievous cupidity 
and shameless utilitarianism has discovered that a 
hideous form of steam barges can earn more money in 
carrying dead loads than a regular steam-ship can, and 
now seek to debase the whole tribe with flat bottoms, 
porcine snoots, and covered-in decks, a kind of portable 
warehouse, called 'whalebacks.' If you see one don't 
mention it, let us pursue our journey in comfort." 

I notice in these Lake engines the commendable feat- 
ure of longer connecting rods, more accessibility all over, 
and what is certainly advanced practice in marine en- 
gine building. Here and there the sections seem fear- 
fully scant, especially in the castings, but the factor 
of safety is no doubt as usual based on the distance be- 
tween ports. 

We went up to Cleveland, Toledo, and into the De- 
troit River, a most wonderful stream having most of 
the features of a river, and lacking some. It is like the 
Niagara, St. Clair and St. Marie Rivers, a connection 
between lakes, always clear, at one level and* flowing 
in peace. 

From Detroit, which seems to be the best paved, 
sewered, lighted and managed city in America, we went 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 113 

through the river and Lakes St. Clair, Huron and the 
Sault Ste. Marie Canal into Great Superior to Duluth, 
and thence to St. Paul by rail. 

My uncle had intended to go on to St. Joseph, but 
changed his mind. "The sewer of sewers," said he, 
"the Missouri River has only one really useful function, 
that of creating sedimentary land. It is a builder, 
leveler, fertilizer and irrigator of endless cornfields, and 
generator of miasmatic effluvia, but it has made an em- 
pire withal. It is all over the country ^ first one place 
and then another, bristling with snags, spotted with 
sand-bars and a terror to steam-boats. When I was 
younger and knew less, I handled the puppet levers up 
there. It is not a pleasant recollection. We will take 
to water here and go down stream." 

St. Paul, St. Anthony, and Minneapolis 

are in effect one city, and hereabout is the most romantic 
place I have seen on the Mississippi River except at 
Lake Pepin. St. Anthony long ago, twenty years ago 
or more, was consolidated with Minneapolis, which was 
a great mistake, in so far as names. St. Anthony was 
on the eastern side of the river, had a beautiful name, 
while "Minneapolis," a combination of Indian and 
Greek, is perhaps the most ridiculous name on the con- 
tinent — a childish and provincial conceit. 

Here the Mississippi tumbles over a cliff 82 feet in 
all, and affords a wonderful water power. There is a 
deep stratum of yellowish-white sandstone of thickness 
not apparent, and over this a capping of hard rock like 
the crust of a pie. As the water wore away the sand- 
stone beneath the falls, the shelving top rock would 
break off and fall into the pool below. This process 
went on continually but not very fast, until at great 



114 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

expense artificial work was made by the Federal Govern- 
ment and the State to stop the falls from receding. 

The soft sandstone is quite a factor in the develop- 
ment of the water power plants here. To arrange one, 
a tunnel for a tail race or discharge way is dug under 
the cap rock out to the desired site for a wheel pit; 
another canal is made, on top, to conduct the water 
from above the f allSj and then a well hole is cut through 
the cap rock to connect the tunnel and canal. This 
forms the wheel pit. The soft sandstone becomes in- 
durated as soon as exposed, and is not much eroded by 
the wash of the water. 

It is as I said a romantic place. Just below is Fort 
Snelling, on a high picturesque bluff or ' ' butte ' ' as they 
would say in California, and there are the falls of 
"Minnehaha." which next to Minneapolis is the farthest 
from euphony that the namers could get. These falls 
are on the Minnetonka River, or creek, the waste-way 
for Lake Minnetonka, a dozen miles away, and here 
comes in a fish story, the first I believe in these notes. 

My uncle had an engagement to look 

over the retaining works at the falls with some civil 
engineers, and as I never took much interest in static 
structures of any kind I concluded to go out to Lake 
Minnetonka with a picnic party of some local society. 
I was a stranger, knew no one and dropped into the 
procession mechanically. At the lake as soon as the 
train stopped, people scattered every way, some to a 
steamer, some to hotels, and many out in boats, until I 
stood alone staring around for company, then started 
to wander around the north side of the lake. 

I came shortly upon an old Noah, who was pitching a 
punt he had been caulking, and asked him where I coulcl 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 115 



get a boat? "All out," said he. "Good day for 
pickerel." This excited my interest at once. 

"Pickerel, that is the same as pike, fine fish, and 
plenty in the lake, but them fellers can't catch 'em," 
said the boatman, twirling his thumb toward a whole 
fleet of boats out in the lake trolling with long lines. 
"No pickerel out there, only some fool half -grown ones. 
The old chaps are lying in the shade along in the shore 
next the grass (bulrushes)." I soon struck up a bar- 
gain for the old punt, a trolling line about three hun- 
dred yards long, spoon hook and tackle. "Now," said 
the old chap, "I must go to town, don't mind them 
dern fools, just you go down round the grass there on 
the shady side, keep close in, hold the line in your 
teeth so you can row and feel; keep close in and you'll 
get more fish than the whole lot of them town fellers." 

I had never seen a pickerel, never held a trolling line, 
but had fished a good deal, and would have made a small 
bet there was not a fish six inches long within five miles 
of there. I started out, run out the long slim line, took 
it in my teeth and rowed along "close in." Directly 
the spoon hook caught, I knew it would, and it came 
near hauling me over the stern of the boat. I dropped 
the oars and grabbed the line, when away back, at 
least a hundred yards, an agile fish sprang into the 
air in a curve, and disappeared. A tugging at the 
line, and the idea at last burst upon me, ' ' I have hooked 
a pickerel ! ' ' Oh 2 the excitement ! I hauled him in ; 
about three pounds weight, and then I went "into busi- 
ness. ' ' 

The old boatman was right. By keeping in and 
dragging the trolling line around the rushes I captured 
nine fish. All I could carry, and when the people col- 



116 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

lected to go home, here was I with the only catch worth 
considering. I had a thousand questions to answer, 
and on the way in, laid down to old fishermen the laws 
of pickerel fishing: "shady side, close in, bulrushes and 
the rest." 

My uncle met the train, and was amazed at the fish. 
"Where did you get 'em, Tech?" said he. "Out at the 
lake, ' ' I answered, but no mention of my catching them. 
Oh no, my uncle was too astute for such a story. I 
have not ventured it but a few times since, and never 
nearer than a thousand miles from Lake Minnetonka. 
There is a mental reserve about its incorporation here 
without an affidavit. 

There is one hope of Minneapolis. It is 

only three miles from St. Paul, or counting suburbs less 
than two miles, and built all along the way, so it is to 
be hoped that St. Paul will some day swallow the Indio- 
Greek town and spread its name over all. 

St. Paul is a solid old city, old as cities go in this 
land, and is at the head of navigation on the Mississippi 
River. From here to the falls, three miles or so, is a 
succession of shoals and rapids. There is a projected 
canal, as there is everywhere at this day. There is good 
reason for one here, however, where they make 9,500,000 
barrels of flour in a year, and saw a large amount of 
timber, besides ship a world of wheat and other products 
from the Falls. 

Going down to St. Paul, my uncle 

pointed out some fruit trees on the way, and said, 
"Tech, set down in that note-book of yours that vege- 
table life like animal life becomes acclimated, otherwise 
you may write that the first settlers here were fools. 
They thought nothing would or could grow up here 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 117 

because it was so cold. Wheat for bread was carried 
from St. Louis, and now it is a wheat country. Fruit 
was not thought of , except some little wild plums about 
the size of olives, and the orchards were confined to 
Siberian crab-apples. These little red fellows looked 
delicious, and became edible after being well frozen and 
compounded with an equal weight of strong sugar. That 
myth lasted twenty years or more, and then apples, 
pears and other hard- wood fruit trees were plantel and 
throve, not at once but gradually. 

"It is cold here, terribly cold in the winter, and hot 
in the summer, but that don't matter, climate is to 
people an accident. The harsher it is the more they 
admire it." 



CHAPTER XVIII. 



HOW A STEAMBOAT FINDS ITS WAY THE TIPPECANOE 

ESTATE GENERAL HARRISON ON ANCIENT MOUNDS 

A LEARNED PRESIDENT "WHEN DEAD HOW SOON 

WE ARE FORGOT^ A TOBOGGAN FEAT. 

My uncle, before he went to sea, was a 



river engineer, and always claimed that it was the best 
school in the world to teach a man what he calls "emer- 
gencies. ' ' 

The art of emergencies, so to speak, is one con- 
tingent on human nature, an inborn trait. Some men 
are never so cool and composed as when they are in a 
"scrape." Then the intense activity of the mind in 
excitement takes the normal course of reasoning. In 
others explodes, so to speak ? scatters, and becomes idiotic, 



118 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

still training and example have much to do with the 
matter. 

Steam-boating in the early times, and even now what 
is left of it on the Mississippi and its great tributaries, 
is full of "emergencies." When at sea one becomes 
nervous as soon as land is neared, but here a great boat 
that will crush like an egg shell, goes thundering along 
on the darkest nights, and in wild storms, between two 
shores within hailing distance, past snags and wrecks, 
over bars, around bends, in some mysterious manner no 
one can explain and never touches anything. 

Before Ave reached St. Paul, I asked my uncle about 
this matter of steering at night, and did not get much 
satisfaction, his remarks were something as follows: 

'■ ' That 's the old question, the first one a landsman 
asks, and the last one a boatman answers, and one that 
has never been answered in a manner to convey much 
information. A pilot can't tell you how he finds his 
way; in fact he don't know, and does not dare to study 
about it. If he did he would get scared, and produce 
an 'emergency.' There is an intuitive perception of 
where you are that arises from a variety of things, that 
would make up a quadratic equation. 

"First there is time, an unconscious measure of how 
far you have come from the last point; there is sound, 
not an echo, although that sometimes is observed, but 
a kind of reflection of sound from the shores, and there 
is the hill line or timber line always visible, except in 
fog; also the appearance of the water or reflection from 
it, and finally the feel of the boat. Any depth less than 
twice the draught is 'felt.' The vibrations change, the 
engines slow down, and the stern sinks or seems to 
whenever the water shoals, because of water piling up 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 119 

at the head. I cannot tell you nor can any one else, how 
a pilot finds the way, but we will see all this as we go 
down the river. 

"I don't like this St. Paul arrangement at all, you 
will miss a good deal. The Ohio River is the ideal one 
for steam-boating, comfortable, calm and beautiful at 
common stages, but outrageous in its fluctuations. 

"Joseph Cowell, an English actor, who traveled here 
before Dickens did, described the Ohio River as a 
'thousand miles long, a mile wide, and eighteen inches 
deep, frozen up for one half the year and dried up the 
other half.' He was here in the summer; six months 
later he might have seen sixty-three feet added to the 
depth. The rise and fall in the middle section 2 about 
Cincinnati^ is sixty- three feet. I have steam-boated all 
day over cornfields in the lower river, and six months 
later seen a boat 'sparred' over the bar at the 'Grand 
Chain' at the same place, or near it, but it is a beautiful 
river. For eight hundred miles from where it begins 
at Pittsburgh, there is not a break in the green hills that 
form its boundary. Never did a river saw out such a 
uniform bed. It is like a keyway in a long shaft. The 
sedimentary lands shift from side to side, but the whole 
width between the hills is the same, and even their 
fertility is invariable. Except at Louisville, there is 
not a rapid or ripple in the thousand miles that a child 
could not row a boat over." 

I was of course much interested in this account of the 
Ohio, and managed its continuance. The river is full 
of legends, Indian and other. It is a frontier line be- 
tween the North and the South, and I much regretted 
our trip had not been down the Ohio Valley, but as it 
was, a good deal was learned ; here is the continuance : 



120 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

"At North Bend, near Cincinnati, sixteen miles below, 
is, all things considered, one of the most romantic places 
on the river. I don't use that term in its common 
sense, for happily there are no romantic places in the 
way of rugged inaccessible cliffs, not worth a dollar a 
square mile, which seems to be the main characteristic 
of romantic places. Here all is peace, the lands are 
tillable, the hills climable, and the water everywhere 
accessible, flowing quietly and available for navigation 
and drinking. 

"At North Bend is a pass about one hundred feet 
high, a notch in the hill between the Ohio and the Big 
Miami Rivers. The latter joins the Ohio six miles below, 
but at the 'gap,' the Ohio bends to the north and the 
Miami to the south, so the two rivers come within half 
a mile of each other divided by a ridge through which 
a tunnel was made about 1840, for the passage of a canal, 
but the main thing of interest to be pointed out here is 
that this was the estate of General Harrison, elected 
President of the United States in 1840, and harrassed 
to death by doctors and office seekers a short time after. 

"It was a grand estate, lying between two rivers for 
a distance of seven miles, averaging a mile or more in 
width, a high ridge or hill of 300 feet elevation, extend- 
ing all the way, except at the pass where the General's 
log cabin was situated on the Ohio side. This old cabin, 
a real log one, where the General lived, was burned down 
about 1860, the foundation yet remaining to be pointed 
out to the curious. 

"Set down in those notes, which are no doubt to be- 
come permanent in the annals of this country, that the 
ninth President of the United States was and is a 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 121 

stranger to his countrymen. They have never known 
much about him. 

"It is a common impression in this country that the 
log cabin President of the United States was a wild, 
hard-cider candidate from the uncultured West. Never 
was there a greater mistake, General William Henry 
Harrison was, judged by fair standards, the most learned 
man that ever sat in the presidential chair. I know that 
most people will laugh at such a proposition, but it is 
true. Who besides, among the Presidents of the United 
States, has been a learned man ? What are their legacies 
in the way of science, art, or even law"? A politician 
is never a learned man, or to state it better, a learned 
man is never a politician. George Washington was far 
and away the most thinking man, down to Harrison, 
and he was both thinking and learned, he was a profound 
thinker, and his views were qualified by scientific attain- 
ments of a high order. 

"In proof of this, there is on record a paper of his, 
contributed to the Cincinnati Historical Society about 
1836, on the probable age of mural remains in the Ohio 
Valley, that is, or ought to be a classic in our language. 
I defy anyone to produce an essay that, aside from a 
wonderful diction, gives more evidence of analytical 
thought. 

"On the General's lands at the summit or point of 
the ridge near the junction of the Ohio and Miami 
Rivers, is one of those ancient mounds, a most wonder- 
ful one, that General Harrison investigated in a true 
scientific way. It belongs to the class called military, 
a fortification in fact, enclosing seventeen acres. The 
walls are now in places more than six feet high on the 
inside, the outer angles being most of the way a con- 



122 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

tinuation of the steep hillside. It overlooks vast plains 
of fertile land for many miles every way, had bastions 
and towers, also great cisterns to contain water or grain, 
or both, the inner walls of these being burned clay, and 
solid and hard, even now. 

"The General had one of these excavated and cleaned, 
also- made careful maps, not only of this, but other 
works of the mound-builders, which are thick there- 
about, the great one at Miamiville being only a few 
miles away. His paper on the subject of these mounds, 
as I have claimed, is a classic in our language, also 
more cogent in character than anything in the Monu- 
ments of the Mississippi Valley, by Squier and Davis. 

"The premises from which age was inferred was the 
timber grown, especially on the works at Fortress Point, 
on his own estate, and were most ingenious. It is many 
years since I read this paper, but the impression on my 
mind was such that I can repeat the substance of it 
now. The General says: 'When the land is denuded 
of its verdure, as was necessary in erecting these vast 
works, and when, after their term of use, the natural 
forest began the work of again clothing the land with 
trees, there was a cycle of changes, such as is observ- 
able in all in this country. The first growth is not that 
of the surrounding forest, but is usually of one kind of 
timber. This yields to destruction by lightning, in- 
sects and other causes, and other species take the place 
of the destroyed trees. These changes go on until at 
the end of a period within some bounds of conjecture, 
the forest on the denuded area assumes its original char- 
acter and diversity. At Fort Hill there is no discern- 
able difference between the forest inside and outside the 
works. On the walls stand the same trees as in the 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 123 

forest around, and of the same size and diversity, and 
from this we may gain some clue to the vast period that 
has elapsed since the works were erected. ' 

''Now I do not know that one sentence of this is 
exact, but it is the idea, clothed in less perfect language, 
and I ask who among our political Presidents has been 
capable of such a paper? General Harrison took a 
great interest in the speculations of his brother-in-law, 
John Cleves Symmes, the 'hollow-world man,' who is 
buried near by the General's tomb, and has on the top 
of a marble column at his grave a sculptured hollow 
globe. I do not know that General Harrison accepted 
the views of Symmes, but we know he was a military 
man, a jurist and a scientific man, who left on the 
country around his home a profound respect for his 
learning. 

' ' Log cabin, forsooth ! Those rough hewed logs 
plastered with mortar to fill the cracks, and roofed with 
riven boards, surrounded more learning and honesty 
than can be extracted from forty palaces, occupied by 
public men of our time, and think of the scant honor it 
brings to his memory! 

"The General, by his request, was buried on an emi- 
nence near his old log cabin, overlooking the wide 
sweep of the Ohio, and visible for miles from passing 
boats. They built up a plain rectangle of brick, about 
four by eight feet, and put a large stone on top, also 
put a picket fence around the grave. 

"The estate fell into other hands, much of it, and 
finally only one representative remained, the Hon. J. 
Scott Harrison, who lived at the 'Point,' father of the 
late President, and who by ill health could not attend 
to more than his own home. The fence around the 



124 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

General's grave rotted down, the hogs got in, and, by 
rooting around the shallow walls, caused the brickwork 
to crumble, and our country came near the disgrace of 
having their most learned and virtuous President rooted 
out of his grave by swine. 

"The governor of Ohio, by a communication to the 
State legislature, secured an appropriation to repair 
the grave and grounds, which was done about 1868. 

"If a man feels constrained to do any great act of a 
public nature, and has any pride in the perpetuation 
of his name, he should at once get out of a republic, or 
out of this country at least ? where as Rip Van Winkle 
says, 'when we are dead, how soon we are forgot.' Of 
course, one of my pursuits has a first regard for all 
kinds of learning connected with natural sciences, and 
why not? Nothing is more ridiculous than a man with 
his head crammed full of the Greek and Latin classics, 
walking around blind. The movements and forces of 
nature are to him a sealed book. He does not know 
what anything is made of. The animal, vegetable and 
mineral elements are to him a mystery. Dogs, horses 
and sheep, trees, potatoes and grass, wood, iron and 
coal are substances. Only this, and nothing more. 
Movements are to him profound phenomena, inscrutable 
mysteries, not catalogued with the Greek and Roman 
gods or the phantoms of rhapsodical nonsense. I do 
not know if General Harrison was a Greek and Latin 
scholar or not, or if he had acquired a knowledge of 
metaphysics and moral philosophy. But of one thing 
we can be surej he knew how to construct a tunnel on 
scientific principles, also knew the essential elements 
that should enter into the administration of human 
government. 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 125 

"One thing he failed in was the angle of repose, or 
the angle of stability for loose soil. One day his horse 
slid from the top to the bottom of an embankment, at 
Cleves, when the tunnel was being made there, fifty 
feet or more, without unseating the General. It was a 
fine feat, well remembered in the neighborhood, and 
will be told of to this day by old residents there, if any 
are left now, which I doubt." 



CHAPTER XIX. 

LOW-PRESSURE STEAMBOAT ENGINES ALSO COMPOUND EN- 
GINES AN OLD WATER-WORKS ENGINE HOW CITIES 

ARE BUILT THE FIRST OF STEAM -MOVED VALVES 

AN ASTONISHING CARPET BAG CINCINNATI 

AS AN ORIGINAL TOWN. 

The account of General Harrison was extremely in- 
teresting to myself, as well as some others who were 
listening, but my main interest in the Ohio River was 
centered in its early navigation and steamboats, and the 
next lecture, to so call it, I deftly shifted to that subject, 
and have the following : 

"My time of steamboating was long ago," said my 
uncle. "Things are changed now, some for the better, 
most of them I suspect, but for wild, reckless, ingenious 
and dare-devil engineering the olden time never had or 
never will have a parallel. 

"No one 'picked up' that trade. It required years 
and years, with youth and vigor to help. Nothing from 
books those times, you had to see, learn, feel and do. 

"I named vigor. There were no balanced valves 
down to 1850, and it required some weight and muscle 



126 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

to pull up a six-inch poppet valve against one hundred 
and twenty-five to one hundred and fifty pounds of 
steam. Not every one could do it with the leverage pro- 
vided, and it was common to handle the throttle so as 
to avoid full pressure in the side pipes. By leaving 
the water cocks open and going a little slow, the exhaust 
valves were easier to raise, but it was no place for a 
weak man or a timid one. There were complications, 
too. These western men were not dumb or slow. 

"There were condensing engines in those times, the 
Xatcliez on the lower river about 1848, the Northerner 
and Southerner in 1850; cylinders six feet bore, and a 
hold full of condensing apparatus, that was all pulled 
out in due time and stowed ashore. It was too clumsy, 
heavy and difficult to handle, expensive to maintain, and 
when balanced up against the saving in coal, it footed 
up like the Indian's gun, 'cost more than it come to.' 

"The Northerner and Southerner were built at Cin- 
cinnati, I think, at least the engines were, and it was 
the pride of the people there to walk through the 
cylinders. A man five feet eight could do it with his 
hat off, and never forget it, but this is not all, we had 
compound engines those times, not sham ones or make- 
shifts but real tandem compounds, cylinders about six- 
teen and thirty inches bore. 

"First was the Hawkey e with a heavy flywheel and 
clutches for the wheels. One night the men made a miss 
with the clutches, threw both out at once, and the en- 
gine with about three revolutions threw the flywheel, 
part of it through the cabin and the remainder down 
through the hull, the boat following in ten minutes and 
drowning about two score of people. Next came the 
Clippers No. 1 and 2 with compound engines, and the 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 127 

'Memphis. The last one I knew well and handled myself 
for a time. 

"The compound engines were set amidships and took 
up a deal of room in a weak part of the vessel. The 
shaft, too, was a nuisance ? terribly in the way, but they 
were compound engines just the same as the Elders in- 
troduced on the Clyde in 1870 and before. 

"Cincinnati was a queer place those times, with more 
originality in an engineering way than could be found 
elsewhere on this continent. There is running there 
now a pair of water-work engines, poppet valve con- 
densing, built about 1844, or fifty years ago, that per- 
sistently refuse to be beaten by others added since, down 
to the present time. There are half a dozen engines 
there, including a bull Cornish one eight feet bore, 
twelve feet stroke, all standing around these old steam- 
boat engines. They go on however, a monument to old- 
time skill. 

"Steam fire engines were originated there about 1850, 
and direct acting steam pumps with steam-moved valves 
were invented about the same time, by a man named 
Wilson, in Cincinnati, much to the consternation of a 
great pump combination, formed about 1872, when this 
fact became known, as it did in a very sensational kind 
of way, which I may tell of some time. Just now I am 
speaking of steamboats. 

"They kept on building them larger and faster, until 
a speed of eighteen miles an hour was reached; not 
over a measured mile and by triangular shore marks 
as is done now-a-days. They had a better plan. For a 
time the packets between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati 
were the swiftest boats, and then came a competing line 
from Wheeling to Cincinnati as the western connection 



128 NOTES BY A STUDENT, 

of the Baltimore and Ohio Railway. Two boats left Cin- 
cinnati every day, and there was *a shore mark, a pole 
with a pair of buck horns on the top, that was set up 
at the end of a twenty-four hours' run. Any boat that 
could pass the mark in twenty-four hours moved the 
pole ahead to her mark, and this was kept up until it 
got up to Parkersburg, Va., at the mouth of the Little 
Kanahwa River, or somewhere above there as I remem- 
ber, and it would have been shoved up the river farther 
if steamboating had not fallen into collapse by railway 
extension. 

"Railways did not carry cheaper, but faster, and with 
the advantage of going all the time, besides could man- 
age Congress and secure the passage of all kinds of 
laws to harass steamboats, until one hardly dares to 
show its head in these times. 

"Under the plea of taking care of passengers, the 
pilots ? engineers, captains and mates must be licensed 
periodically, the boilers and hulls must be examined, 
the equipment is prescribed and every kind of paternal 
care exercised, but when the same passengers travel by 
rail, the Government turns them over to the mercies of 
the line, which may use dangerous machinery, ram- 
shackle carriages, put incompetent people in charge and 
kill three thousand passengers and more thousands of 
their own men each year without let or hindrance." 

At St. Louis we spent a day or two in 

looking around, and found the usual characteristics of 
all large American cities, evidence of its being built 
by "pressure from the outside," and to accommodate 
commerce. 

In the old world cities were built first as the founda- 
tion, then their influence spread as from a generating 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 129 

center. The wealth, learning and skill flowed from the 
cities outward. In this manner the cities were tolerably 
well completed and put into comfortable order first, the 
country following. Here it is the opposite. A rich 
country around, presses on the cities which are built in 
half baked forim without the sanitary appliances, im- 
provements or municipal order, that the Romans knew 
two thousand years ago. 

Building a city is no small matter, it calls for the sum 
of all knowledge that exists and something more, but 
even this is less difficult than to govern one, or so it 
seems in these times. 

St. Louis is fast taking on the attributes of a city, 
and aside from coal grime, bad odors and a tendency to 
crawl out all over the country, is quite even with her 
colleagues. The high price of ground, and the specu- 
lator in "additions," are the obstacles that beset a city 
set on a plain. Land values are evaded by "moving 
out," and the facilities for travel permit this, so the 
municipal resources when spread out over miles after 
miles of border area, are not enough to pave, sewer and 
light the streets. If one wants to build a good city, a 
wall should be built around it first thing, or it should 
be put on an island or in a basin surrounded by hills, 
so it cannot "slop over," and flow out into the country. 

This idea came first from my uncle, but I have for 
some years past made it a measure of constant obser- 
vations, and find the truth of it in all cases, and don't 
think we will ever have a model city, until the land on 
which it stands belongs to the city itself. How far this 
system should extend I will not attempt to say, but 
every circumstance points to it being the only way of 



130 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

building and maintaining in an equitable and successful 
way, what we call cities. 

1 was impatient to hear the story of the 

Cincinnati pump inventor, and so reminded my uncle 
of his promise one evening at the hotel. 

"The circumstances," said he, "are typical of some 
others, that will or may find their way into that note- 
book of yours. 

"This Wilson was a kind of plodder, a cranky kind 
of fellow, who reasoned originally about things, and 
somehow stumbled upon the idea of amplifying the main 
steam valve of a pump into a piston, and then controll- 
ing its movements by a second valve moved by another 
piston. The same idea was extended in what are called 
duplex pumps, indeed these are the same thing, only the 
main valves and their pistons not only distribute steam 
to another piston, but also operate a second pump. 

' ' The matter lies here ; no steam piston can move 
directly the valves that supply it steam, some other 
force must be called in, sometimes a spring, sometimes 
a weight that goes on and completes the valve movement, 
but best of all a little leading valve that distributes 
steam to a second steam piston which moves the main 
valve. I explain these matters to show what Wilson 
discovered or invented. 

"Later on, about 1872, the various makers of direct 
acting steam pumps in this country formed a combina- 
tion, one of the first of the kind, to keep up prices. 
They put up a fund for litigation, retained the most 
famous patent lawyers, and set out to manage matters 
their own way. 

"Out in Cincinnati there was a small firm, with small 
capital in money, but a tolerably large asset of skill 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 131 

and wit, who were making such pumps. The combina- 
tion scarce regarded this firm, and intended to crush 
them with some sham lawsuits when the time came. 

"There was a convention of the pump combination 
at New York, and the senior member of the Cincinnati 
firm, who was not only then, but is yet one of the ablest 
hydraulic engineers in this country, packed up an old 
carpet bag full of papers, references, drawings and other 
ancient lumber relating to pump making in Cincinnati, 
and went to the convention. Of course he was not ad- 
mitted, but on the last day, under an application for 
membership, which was assessed at several thousand 
dollars, he secured the right of being heard. 

"He was a man of commanding appearance, given to 
laconic expressions, and the superior of any and all of 
the members in general e'ducation as well as on the sub- 
ject of pumps. He quietly informed the convention 
that he was quite willing to pay the fee or assessment, 
as soon as he could see some equivalent that could be 
set up for his cash, but as the patents on which the 
combination was based were dubious, in fact invalid, 
he thought the sum of admission too high. This of 
course kicked up a 'commotion, and on being asked for 
his authority, the mild man from Cincinnati began to 
turn out the contents of <his carpet bag on a table, and 
in a few minutes was admitted free of all dues, and 
appointed chairman of the 'committee on patents.' 

"I have left out a good deal, no doubt, remembering 
only the main circumstances, but it shows a wonderful 
phase of mechanic art in and about Cincinnati these 
times. Nor was this all, medical doctors there were 
famous, the wine industry began there; learning of 
one kind or another flourished. The North and South 



132 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

met there, but the city was hemmed in all around by 
hills. It got hot in June and never cooled off until 
October. The water was execrable, and mosquitos de- 
voured one in the summer, but the city has nourished, 
and is one of the best governed in America. They once 
voted three millions of dollars in a lump to pave the 
streets, and at another time built a railway to New 
Orleans, the Cincinnati Southern, that has a bridge, 
twenty-two miles long, over Pontchartrain, which we 
may see later on. ' ' 



CHAPTER XX. 

A MONOLOGUE ON THE MISSISSIPPI HOW A RIVER OPERATES 

WHAT A MILLION IS WHAT ONE GAINS BY OBSERV- 

ING A HOMILY ON HUMAN EFFORT. 

The Mississippi flowed before us here in 



St. Louis. I had seen it before, but it looked dwarfed 
now, and crawled beneath the great steel bridge in a 
sullen, sleepy kind of way. I knew very little about 
the river, except the schoolboy lore, which is as near 
nothing as one can imagine, but I -soon learned more. 

My uncle had fallen in with some old friends, none 
of them steamboat men now, but captains nearly all. 
Some were merchants, some traders, and some nothing 
but owners of a lively recollection, tempered as one 
might infer with a strong flavor of imagination. 

We were assembled on the hotel veranda, and after a 
pause, an old Captain Somebody, said to my uncle: 
"Camshaft, you were always eyes all over, saw every- 
thing^ pried into everything, comparing, figuring, read- 
ing and remembering, now just tell us how the old 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 133 

river compares with other rivers you have seen. I know 
it is a good many years since you took to salt water, as 
I always knew you would sometime, but you remem- 
ber the river." 

This was just what I was waiting for. The subject 
was a congenial one for my uncle, and I got out my 
note-book at once. Here are the notes: 

"The Mississippi River is four thousand miles long, 
counting the Missouri, which should be called the 
Mississippi. It is the main stem as to length, but right 
here let me say the length of river has nothing to do 
with its size. Most people imagine that the water from 
the little lake at the head finds its way to the gulf. It 
is no such thing. If there was not a continual accre- 
tion of water all along the way, the river would run out 
and dry up long before it reaches New Orleans, or here 
even, like some rivers do half way up from their mouths. 
Here, Tech! do some figuring for me. 

"Take a thousand miles of this river from here to 
Natchez a mile wide, and see how many square miles 
that will make. One thousand. Of course it would. 
Now tell me how much water it would take to cover a 
square mile one-fourth of an inch deep. One square 
mile — 640 acres — 27,878,400 square feet — divided by 48 
to find the volume of the % inch in cubic feet, gives 
580,800, multiplied by 1,000 gives 580,800,000 cubic feet. 

"Might just as well be half as much or twice as 
much," said my uncle. "The figures convey no figure 
or conception to the mind, but this is the amount of 
water that will evaporate in one hot day all over the 
river between here and Natchez, and if there was no 
accretion of water, the river would not reach there, but 
all be dried up on the way. There are more than fifty 



134 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

rivers large enough to steamboat in, that empty inU- 
this great drainway. The water here is not what enters 
the gulf at all. 

' ' The river down at Cairo is a mile wide, and averages 
about 90 feet of depth from there to New Orleans. It 
is the largest river in the world by volume and length, 
the volume is made up by a velocity of four miles an 
hour. A river may be five miles wide and have half 
the volume of flow. The Amazon toward its mouth is 
an example. But not in water alone is this river ahead. 
It carries more mud than all the rest combined. This 
I suppose you know from the mixture you have been 
drinking. Some one curious in such matters computes 
that six millions tons of earth is carried down annually. 
He might just as well have said sixty millions. As I 
said before, one cannot conceive of such a quantity, it 
should be expresed in mountains, farms, or square miles 
of territory. 

''This mud comes out of the Missouri River, nearly 
all of it. The mouth is just above here, and will be 
here soon, at the rate it is moving down stream. The 
Missouri, contrary to all rules for river construction, 
is a rapid stream in an alluvial bed that shifts about 
so much that it keeps on top, which is a fortunate mat- 
ter, otherwise it would cut a channel half a mile deep, 
and spoil all the cornfields along the route. 

"The Mississippi Valley means all between the Alle- 
ghany and the Rocky mountain ranges, as we commonly 
say. It means about three-fourths of this country, and 
nearly as much in area as all the principal countries of 
Europe, Russia excepted. 

"The sinuosity is unaccountable, for no one can ex- 
plain why a river should go meandering around right 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 135 

and left, making up in a thousand miles from here five 
hundred of lost distance. Fifty per cent is deviation. 
What this is for, what the cause and wherefore, no one 
knows, unless it is to prevent the whole valley from 
being sawed in two pieces, as would soon occur if the 
river was straight. 

''As it is, there is a continual turmoil for thousands 
of miles, especially on the Missouri branch. People and 
towns are shifted from one State to another, and people 
on the banks and islands don't know where to vote or 
pay their taxes. Islands come and go. The channel is 
first one place and then another. In my time you could 
always detect a Missouri River pilot, by the nature and 
vigor of his profanity. It was a distilled essence one 
might say, and it is just the same now, I mean the river, 
only freights are so low that a man cannot afford a new 
steamboat every fourth trip or so, the traffic has nearly 
ended, has also become dangerous in proportion, because 
boats have to pass pretty often to know where the chan- 
nel is. 

"Sometimes, or quite often indeed, the whole river 
scatters over the country, like the Skargord in Sweden.; 
scatters so there is no telling if it all finds the way 
back. It does not indeed, and here comes another idea 
about rivers, an idea that shows how we act and think 
on impressions instead of facts. Saturate a sponge and 
lay it down, a small trickle of water will run off, but the 
main body remains in the sponge. Fill up the sponge 
once an hour, and you have a figure of the basin of a 
river. The bed is filled up once a year, and the water 
passing here is a mere trickle compared to the whole 
volume, the surface water, so to speak. Dry out the bed 



136 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

of this river, and it is not likely that a drop of water 
would run here for ten years to come. 

"The Mississippi, as I said, is a mile wide from Cairo 
to Vicksburg, then grows narrower, and from New Or- 
leans to the Belize is only half a mile wide, but a little 
deeper, not deep enough however to represent the con- 
tinued accretion of water on the way. The subterranean 
feature of rivers is the most wonderful part. The rise 
and fall here and for a long way down is about fifty 
feet, then less and less, and only one-fourth as much 
at New Orleans, nine feet some will tell, but it is more — 
fourteen, perhaps. It has spilled out, gone up into the 
air, over and through the banks and levees, a good deal 
down the bayous, such as La Fourche and Plaquemine 
two hundred miles from the real mouth, but are mouths 
themselves in a sense. 

"It is a queer river, a wild raging river with a water 
shed three thousand miles one way and two thousand 
the other : which multiplied together give six millions, 
in so far as giving one an idea of quantity or dimen- 
sions. A million is a nonentity, no one comprehends 
it, that is, it conveys no tangible idea of capacity or 
dimensions, it is only a figure to be split up into smaller 
factors, but this Mississippi Valley too is nearly in the 
same category. 

This was the longest continued lecture 

1 had ever heard from my uncle, or secured for my 
notes, and iwas of much interest to the company. It 
also led up to a new idea or observed fact on my part, 
namely: mankind are unconsciously divided into those 
who deal with reason over what is seen, and those who 
go on inductively to deal with and reason over what is 
not seen, but implied. To some, nature is a book full 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 137 

of hidden meanings and signs that to others are only 
visible facts. 

A chemist, for example, in looking at substances, sees 
them as a combination of elements or gases. He is like 
s person traveling in a land where his own language is 
used. He reads the signs, the newspapers, hears all 
that is said, and understands it, but shift him to an- 
other land with a strange language, where his eyes, 
ears and tongue are of little use, and he is in the posi- 
tion of one without scientific knowledge. 

He sees rivers flow, movement all around, but does not 
know what causes it, he sees rain fall, but does not 
know from whence it came or whither it goes. Plant 
life, animal life and physical laws, are all hidden be- 
hind an inscrutable veil, and he goes on groping in 
the dark, and is happy, so long as he does not know there 
is more to be understood. 

Then again comes the question, what does a person 
gain by this faculty or qualification of understanding 
things? Answer — nothing. It is only others that gain. 
Education constitutes a man a martyr, opening to his 
eyes wide fields of effort and labor, solely for others, 
his little part being only the exercise of faculties that 
physically he would be better without. 

Many a time have I thought how this prying, inves- 
tigating faculty of my uncle had brought him a life of 
toil and labor, the fruits of which were scattered over 
a wide field, beside the little scraps that fell to my lot, 
and to these notes. Suppose instead that he had con- 
fined his time, thoughts and energies to making shoes, 
all alike, year in and year out, eating his poor bread ii? 
comfort, and never looked outride a little shop, or 
reached beyond his cobbler's bench, run the long race 



138 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

happily, honestly, and at the end without enemies, laid 
down in peace, his corporal part to be resolved into 
gases, the existence of which he possessed no knowledge 
or hint, and his spirit to that goal where the best of us 
tend; would not this have been a more happy life? 
Quien sabef 



CHAPTER XXI. 

AN INDIAN MASSACRE A QUEER WATER-CRAFT AN ESSAY 

ON "BILERS" A CAST-IRON DOCTOR. 

Some time, perhaps not long hence, 



there will be classic ground, about the Falls of St. An- 
thony, in this upper river country. Indian stories and 
traditions are as thick as legends on the Rhine, most 
of them nearly as absurd, and all of them ; I mean as 
a lot, are equally true. One, however, is true. That 
of the Winona massacre in 1861, when the Sioux Nation 
was called down from the North to be paid their annual 
stipend, and failing to get the money set to work and 
murdered a large number of people in Winona Valley. 

The circumstances were so overshadowed by the great 
events of the Civil War, then transpiring, that people 
have forgotten this, one of the greatest Indian massacres 
that ever took place on the continent. An old resident 
of the country^ we happened to meet, thus told the 
story, which I have set down in his own words as nearly 
as possible. 

"Ingens are bad, no doubt, especially Sioux, that is, 
they are not afraid, and sullen, cruel scamps, but Ingen 
agents is worse. The money was sent out here from 
Washington for the Ingens, and they were asked to 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 139 

come down here to Winona to be paid. By the time 
pay day comes around these fellows had no ammunition, 
no blankets, nothing to eat, and were just like a lot of 
half-starved cattle running to water and feed. Several 
thousand came to Winona, Sioux, Chippewas and others. 
The money got here in time, all in coin, but the cussed 
agents discovered that by sending it back to St. Louis 
and exchanging it for paper bills they could pay the 
Ingens and pocket the premium, which all at once 
had jumped up to twenty-five per cent or more. 

"Now, just think of it. Here was a wild, starving 
crowd of savages, without anything to eat, and no 
shelter; squaws, children^ old and young devils of all 
kinds, starving crazy, and believing that the Govern- 
ment had fooled them, and enticed them down here to 
die. I don't want to excuse Ingens, but just think of it. 
They kept getting wilder and hungrier, until at last 
out came the knives, hatchets and clubs, and the set- 
tlers were killed right and left. It was terrible. The 
soldiers soon settled the matter, and, as you know, thir- 
ty-five of the wretches were hung, all in a row, like 
blackbirds on a limb, and the pity was that an Ingen 
agent was not strung up between each pair of Ingens." 

This matter I must leave to history, and also would 
willingly omit some remarks on "Ingens" by my uncle, 
that followed, but candor demands its inclusion now 
that the subject is open. 

"The Indians of North America," said he, "are a 
strange race of wonderful diversity, but all with strong 
passions and a kind of rude manhood that is not com- 
mon among other savages. They do not like to be lied 
to, and once they are deceived that ends their con- 
fidence forever. They look with distrust on white men, 



140 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

and with good cause. "We always manage to send our 
worst men to come in contact with the Indians, I mean 
in a civil capacity. An 'Indian agent' is a synonym 
with Jeremy Diddler, with cruelty thrown in, and the 
treatment of the Indian tribes must pass down in history 
alongside of negro slavery in this land of the free and 
home of the brave, or as a common rendering of it some 
years ago, which substituted 'slave' for 'brave.' 

"Old William Penn had no trouble with Indians, 
neither had the British Government, nor has the Cana- 
dian Government. Go a hundred miles from here, 
across the line into Canada, and you will find there is 
no trouble with Indians, not the least, never has been, 
and never will be so long as they are treated in good 
faith. This is easy to understand. Savages, or, to use 
a better name, uneducated people, have certain traits 
just as strongly developed as what we call civilized 
people. They have confidence, respect and resentment, 
and passion just the same, but are wanting in penetra- 
tion^ or the faculty of divining the intentions and 
schemes of men skilled in arts mysterious to them, so 
they are always ready to believe and exaggerate what- 
ever savors of deceit. The difficulty with our people, 
and all others who call themselves civilized, is that 
they want to thrust on other people their customs, 
religion, whiskey, guns, penitentiaries and general ras- 
cality. 

"I have been among Indians a good deal, not here in 
this country, but among real Indians, natives of India, 
where there is no whiskey, no stealing, and, I believe, 
more religion than I have yet found among white men. 
I am not speaking of Mohammedan India, or Bhuddistic 
India, but the whole of it, or so much as is reached by 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 141 

the common lines of travel. These natives here should 
not be called Indians any more than Italians or Rus- 
sians. They have nothing to do with Indian, more- 
over are not like Indians, except as to color, that means 
the same in men as it does in horses." 

We finally got started on a steamer, to 

me a queer kind of craft that seemed to require some bale 
ropes and shores to hold it together. It was an ex- 
ample of attenuated cheapness, that cost per ton, or 
square yard, about as much, perhaps less, than would 
have built a house of like size on the land, still it was, 
except as to flimsiness, comfortable,, convenient and 
steamed at a fair speed. The most annoying thing was 
the vibration. One could not read in the vicinity of 
the wheels, and everything loose seemed to be crawling 
about with the jar, but the scheme, so to call it, is in- 
genious withal. There is more steamboat for the 
money than any one would suppose possible, and that 
where money is by no means cheap or plenty. Alleg- 
heny pine, the white, soft, aromatic fir of that name, 
but mostly coming from the northwest, is used for al- 
most every purpose. The whole upper works are of 
pine and paint, the latter tasteful and laid on thick, a 
fearfully combustible arrangement, which the chief 
engineer told me would burn up totally in five minutes. 

Strangers who come here are always on the lookout 
for boiler explosions, myself among the number, and 
apprehension was increased by a grizzly old native in 
the hotel at St. Paul, who volunteered some history in 
the matter that was not of an assuring kind, and here 
let me say that even positive knowledge does not always 
protect the human mind from the influence of error. 
I know as well as a person can well learn when a boiler 



142 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

will explode, or the circumstances under which it will 
"come away," to use a sailor's expression, but here I 
find myself influenced by the twaddle of an ignorant 
old fellow, who could not distinguish between a steam 
boiler and a saw log if the two were side by side. 

"Bilers," said he, "don't explode now as much as 
they used to. There ain't so many of them, for one 
thing, and the men are too lazy nowadays to fire them, 
but we don't know any more about it now than we did 
fifty years ago, when the Red Wing went up, nor when 
the Moselle went up sixty years ago at Cincinnati, and 
left nothing but a hole in the water. The trouble is 
there are so many causes people can't find them out. 
The polarity of the water is one cause, crystallization 
is another cause ; and decomposition of the water also, 
besides the bottom gets covered with mud and blows 
out. Some folks say it is too much pressure; well, 
there must be pressure around or else there would be 
no force, but steam pressure alone don't act like gun- 
powder, and hoist a whole steamboat into the air a 
thousand feet high. There is something more, and you 
can't get a steamboat man to subscribe to such a theory. 
It won't do, it ain't reason, a biler must have a weak 
spot. Why don't that go first, and when it does go a 
square foot of hole would let all the steam out in a wink 
or half a wink? You may talk about ingines and ma- 
chinery, and all that, and I am bound to believe what 
you say, but on biler explosions your theory won't 
work. ' ' 

I do not want to bring discredit on the venerable 
faculty of my alma mater, but there was one thing, and 
only one in the crude lecture above recited, that shook 
my confidence, and that was the weak point in a 



NOTES BY A STUDENT 143 

"biler, " and why a rupture did not end there as soon 
as "vent" was gained, unless relief of pressure per- 
mitted all of the water to flash into steam. 

1 went down on the lower deck, about 

two feet above the water line, and examined the en- 
gines. They were set on solid keelsons of timber, in- 
clined about ten degrees to the crank shaft, puppet 
lever valves, wooden connecting rod, and between them 
a "doctor," who did the pumping for the vessel in- 
dependent of the main engines. How this latter-named 
implement got its name the annals of the river do not 
explain, but it is a "doctor" everywhere. The word 
"auxiliary" had not found its way out West when 
these doctors were invented, . but name aside I must set 
them down as the most complete thing of the kind I had 
ever seen. This view, however, as it must be here writ- 
ten, is not wholly my own, because I consulted my 
uncle on this doctor problem, and found as usual he 
had, at some time long past, put the subject through 
his crucible of analysis in the usual manner. 

"These Mississippi steamboat doctors," said he, 
"represent the finest mechanical combination in the 
whole range of steam machinery. They are essentially 
a plain beam engine with a row of pumps on each side 
of the beam. The fulcrum frame is composed of hol- 
low columns, the best form possible, performing also 
the function of pipes. Th^ere are supply pumps, I 
never say feed pumps since the Frenchmen have trans- 
lated the name as pomp alimentaire, or "food pump;" 
there are bilge pumps and others, as many as are re- 
quired. Everything is on end, consequently con- 
densed into the smallest space possible, the strains are 
nearly direct on all connections, and there is one fea- 



144 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

ture you may have overlooked ? the action of the fly- 
wheel. 

"On all land pumps having a flywheel the idea is to 
produce uniform rotation or speed. Of course the 
primary object or function is to regulate the stroke, and 
obtain proper valve motion, but, as said, the 'idea' is to 
secure tolerably uniform speed of rotation. In a doctor 
this is not looked for. There is not much room for a 
flywheel, and not much for it to do. It carries over 
the centers, of course, but the idea is to permit the 
steam piston to act directly on the water pistons, or as 
much so as possible, and this produces very irregular 
motion. In effect it is a direct-acting steam pump with 
a regulated stroke, and a plain slide distributing valve 
for the steam. 

"These doctors are reliable in every way. They 
stand in open view between the engines, and the least 
derangement of the pumps is at once detected by the 
symptoms. They have more science in them than the 
whole auxiliary pumping outfit for a man-of-war. By 
science I mean common sense, the two terms being in a 
way convertible. The doctor goes on forever; I never 
knew one to fail. Everything about the pumps is in 
duplicate, for the double purpose of balancing forces 
and furnishing a relay in case of accident. You may 
find all the fault you will with the wooden engines, 
sheet-iron furnaces, and slam-bang valve gear, but be 
careful what you set down in disparagement of the 
'doctor.' When I build a steamship or erect a large 
steam power on land, both of which events are alike 
improbable, I will first thing buy a steamboat 'doctor,' 
and then build the rest around it. It is fifty years old, 
without blemish in its reputation, and has never been 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 145 

improved so far as I know. The first doctor was like 
the last one. The castiron eagles on the beam and the 
vermilion paint have gone out, but the main features 
are all there, and will stay there." 



CHAPTER XXII. 

A SAINTLY CITY SIX MILES OP STEAMBOATS A FALLEN 

CITY CHARLES MACKAY ON THE CRESCENT CITY A 

TOP DRAINAGE SYSTEM A PAVEMENT FOR 200 

YEARS CARPET BAGGERS RIVER PIRATES A 

BRIDGE 22 MILES LONG ON FLAT BOATS. 

St. Louis, now a great city, founded in 



1746, nearly 150 years ago, named, it is said, after 
Louis XV, who was no saint, indeed was quite the oppo- 
site of a well-regulated saint, and considering its en- 
vironment, is a small city. It was transferred to the 
United States in 1804 from its French owners, and 
should now be the main city of the United States, and 
would be if there had been no railways, but these con- 
verted it to a way station. In 1852 there were 100,000 
people here, now 450,000 (1895). 

The old steamboat levee in 1860 was six miles long, 
and as many as one hundred and seventy steamboats 
have been counted there at one time. This seems an 
enormous number, but when one begins to count up 
water courses the wonder is there were not more steam- 
boats. Let us count up this mileage, or the main part 
of it. The Missouri River, 2,000 miles; Mississippi, 
upward, 750 miles; Mississippi, downward, 1,300 miles; 
the Ohio, 1,000 miles; Red River, 1,100 miles; "White 
River, 400 miles; Tennessee, 300 miles; Cumberland, 



146 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

300 miles; Wabash, 300 miles, in all, of free water 
course, navigable for large boats, 7 ? 450 miles, to which 
can be added enough in smaller rivers to make up 5,000 
miles more. Suppose that railways had not been in- 
vented, and all this commerce was confined to river 
cities, what would Cincinnati, St. Louis and New Or- 
leans be now? 

New Orleans, the Crescent City, is like Babylon, the 
fallen. It is not the city it was at one time, and can 
never be again. Even if its commerce should under 
modern methods rise to the same volume as thirty years 
ago the place would in no sense be the same. The city 
has not declined so much as the people have. There 
was always much crime there, principally of violence, 
but this has given way to quiet rascality taught by the 
circumstances of war, and principally by the " carpet- 
bag" regime and the Freedman's Bureau, by means of 
which the carpet-bag officers gained their places. 

"New Orleans," said my uncle, "had to be here. 
There had to be a city at the end of this mighty valley, 
otherwise no one not a double fool would ever have 
thought of laying out a town on a marsh at water level. 
Why they cannot bury one here, the dead are put into 
mounds, like flowers in pots. The drainage is on top 
of the ground, as you can see, and you can take up a 
paving stone out there in the street, dig down a foot or 
so, and then run a cane fishing pole down full length. 
You see that big building over there made of granite, 
that is the custom house, and has under it all sorts of 
contrivances to hold it up, including some thousands 
of cotton bales, so it is said. Well, that building has 
gone down about nine feet, and will continue to go. 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 147 

' ' The St. Charles Hotel, where we are now sitting, has 
been held up pretty well. It is an old house, and has 
rested on piles, or at least partly so, also other known 
devices to secure notation in mud. 

"There are queer things here, many of them. Out 
there on Canal street you see it is paved with large 
squares of granite. I suppose you think they are flag- 
stones or veneering. No such a thing. These stones are 
equilateral cubes, with six sides to wear out. As soon 
as one side is worn another can be turned up, but you 
need not watch for that operation. The side you see 
has been in use for thirty-five years, and is good yet. 
Six times thirty-five is two hundred and ten years of 
wear, and that will pay for quarrying out granite cubes 
in New Hampshire and carrying them here. A number 
of other streets are laid in the same way, and are the 
best paved in America. 

"I suppose you are wondering where the drainage 
goes to when the river is higher than the city. It does 
not go that way. Behind here is a chain of estuaries 
or lakes, Ponchartrain and Borgne, connected with the 
Gulf and lower than the river, a little lower, but not 
much, but always at one level. The sewage is lifted by 
wheels back of the city, and thus given head enough 
to flow back to Ponchartrain, six miles away. 

"New Orleans is not a river city altogether, it is in 
effect on salt water, and luckily too. If it were not the 
heat would kill one at night, unless the mosquitos had 
performed that office in advance. Six miles out from 
here is what makes New Orleans endurable in summer. 
Pine lakes of salt water, or brackish water, clear and 
cool, with all the comfortable inventions known to 
modern taste and contrivance, gardens, music, restau- 



148 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

rants, theaters and other things, which a Frenchman 
alone could invent and maintain. 

"Out of the old French and still older Spanish ele- 
ment here, coupled with the Southern chivalry, which 
people sometimes deride, came to this city certain attri- 
butes of an advanced civilization, not quite extinct at 
this time, but greatly impaired. These old Southern 
folk had their good traits. They would shoot each 
other sometimes, burn a nigger now and then, consume 
a large amount of liquor, and swear like the army in 
Flanders, but they would not 'steal.' The carpet bag- 
gers taught them that, and a very sorry lesson it proved 
to be. 

"You perhaps don't know what this term "carpet 
baggers" means. It indicates a public officer whose in- 
terest in the country was carried in a carpet bag; came 
here to get an office, issue public bonds, sell them, pocket 
the money, and clear out. Go out about here to any 
city, and the trail remains in the form of a bonded 
debt. Cromwell in Ireland is the only parallel I can 
think of. Austin, Houston, Mobile, Baton Rouge were 
taken in. Here in New Orleans there was veritable war, 
cannon, barricades, the United States Mint turned into 
a fort. 

"At the end of the great Civil War the white people 
were all 'tore up,' as they describe it. They did not 
vote, in fact did not dare to vote. The negroes were 
marched to the polls, and a stranger with a carpet bag 
became a mayor, others councilmen, and even a gov- 
ernor in this State, but to sum it up this political con- 
quest of the South destroyed or stole more of her wealth 
than was lost in the Civil War. That is a strong state- 
ment, but is supported not only by facts, but admitted 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 149 

by any honest and impartial citizen whose opinion you 
may ask. 

"There were always pirates here, river thieves, that 
carried on a kind of Captain Kid business. They stole 
everything from fruit to fence rails, and from young 
chickens to horses. There was little of the common law 
machinery along the coast from Baton Rouge down, 
the code depending mostly on long-range rifles and re- 
volvers. The 'chicken thieves,' that is, small thief 
boats, prowled around the river. They had 'dug outs,' 
little light canoes, to go ashore in. They would go 
under the wharves here, and slit coffee sacks through 
the cracks, and draw down a canoe full of green coffee, 
paddle out to the thief boat, commonly a small sloop, 
and come back for another load. The men were for- 
eigners, Spanish, Italians and Portuguese mostly. 
When a planter saw one of these craft lying off his 
plantation he usually opened fire on them with a rifle. 
This was the only kind of stealing known here in former 
days, but they have fifty variations of it now, mostly 
within the pale of the law, but no better for that; in 
fact, worse. A thief under cover of the law, the church, 
or an army, is the meanest of all thieves. A real high- 
wayman is a saint in comparison. 

"The Belize is down a hundred miles or so from here. 
I don't know what the term means, other than the 
mouths of the Mississippi. There are three principal 
ones, and a dozen smaller ones, but fewer now than 
when Captain Eads built the mattress walls there, 
called jetties. He concentrated the water, caused a 
scour in one of the main channels, and produced 
twenty-six feet of water, instead of fifteen, or so, that 
existed before. Very few go down there, there is noth- 



150 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

ing to go for. The great river dies there, flattens out 
like a jelly fish exposed to the sun, and the waters flow 
into the ocean to begin a new round of fog and clouds, 
that are converted to rain at the head waters, four 
thousand miles away. There is the same amount of 
water all the time, but it shifts around." 

The greatest feature of this country 

here, and for two hundred miles above, also for an un- 
known distance each way, is swamps. Going out to 
Lake Ponchartrain, six miles <_ so on the shell road, a 
veritable road made of shells, the swamps are on each 
side. What it means I cannot make out. That the land 
and water should have arrived at levels so nearly the 
same, and remain there for ages, as the great trees attest, 
is a strange thing indeed. The lakes, or at least Pon- 
chartrain, are only a little lower. Straight across this 
lake, twenty-two miles, the Cincinnati Southern Rail- 
way has driven piles and built a bridge. Think of a 
bridge twenty-two miles long, but it is there. Raise the 
bed of this lake a few feet, not more than six, and, ex- 
cept a channel here and there, it would be a "swamp," 
and bear huge trees, be covered with jungle and reeds, 
beneath which, and among which, would swarm all 
kinds of life of the least desirable kind, serpents, mos- 
quitoes, alligators, snapping turtles, and other things 
of a creeping and venomous kind. 

1 heard the term "flat boat" several 

times since coming into the Mississippi Valley, and had 
some idea of its meaning, but not very clearly. Last 
evening a man remarked: "That was in flat-boat 
times," indicating an age when this species of aquatic 
craft flourished, so I lost no time in asking an explana- 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 151 

tion of my uncle, who was good enough, to go to the 
bottom of the matter. 

"A flat boat/' said he, "is a Western invention, is 
a punt a hundred feet long, or, to be more exact, is a 
rectangular water-tight box, sixty to a hundred feet 
long, eighteen to twenty-two feet wide, six to eight feet 
deep, and is the cheapest means of moving freight ever 
devised in the world, if we except rafts, and even these 
need not be excepted, because they float in the water, 
while a flat boat conveys its load dry. 

"Of course you never saw a flat boat built and never 
will. They were an evolution of this valley, and not 
known elsewhere. Get out that notebook and I will go 
over the process. It will not involve the calculus^ or 
quadratic equations even. I will not touch on radiant 
matter, electrical hysteresis, or the fourth dimension, 
still the art deserves a place in that notebook among 
other imperishable facts to be dug out at some future 
age. 

"To begin, suppose two or three men that you would 
call farmers living on one of the small tributaries of the 
Ohio River, for example, have during the winter months 
'cleared land,' and in so doing have prepared a hundred 
cords of hard wood, that is, beech, maple and hickory, 
also have some bacon, hoop poles and tan bark, perhaps 
corn, pumpkins, dried fruit, shingles, cedar posts, or 
other commodities to sell. These things are worth 
money at Cincinnati, Louisville, or other cities on the 
river, and worth nothing whatever on the ground where 
produced. Steamboats cannot come there, and hauling 
is out of the question, so these men take their axes and 
go out into the forest to hunt up a 'gunwale tree,' that 
is a tulip or poplar, as they call it, large enough to 



152 NOTES BY A SWDENT. 

make a pair of gunwales, or 'gunnels,' to construct a 
flat boat. Up to sixty feet long, or even one hundred 
feet long one tree will do, but the longer gunwales have 
to be spliced. 

"The tree is felled, and squared by hewing to lines, 
twenty or twenty-four by sixteen inches. This beam, 
weighing tons, is then raised six feet or so by rocking it 
on a crib on the seesaw method, and is slit edgewise into 
two parts with a whipsaw. These gunwales, 8 by 20 
inches, are then dragged down to the water's edge, and 
set on their edge on launching ways. Each end is bev- 
eled off for the rake, end beams are framed in, so also 
cross timbers about 5 by 8 inches laid flat about six 
feet apart, tenoned and draw pinned into the gunwales 
four inches below the edge. Next there is pinned on 
these 'stringers' about 2V-> by 6 inches, running fore 
and aft, three feet apart. These will be one and one- 
half inches below the gunwale, which is then rebated 
about two inches back to let in the bottom planking, 
one and one-half inches thick, put on crosswise, every- 
thing pinned with hard wood trenails about one inch 
in diameter. 

"The boat is then caulked with tow or oakum, butt 
and main seams pitched with tar, and is ready to 
launch. The gunwales are raised with levers, some 
greased slide boards put on the ways, and the immense 
shallow box is shoved into the water, and now comes a 
puzzle. The boat is upside down, and must be turned 
over. To do this some planks are set up along one side, 
and the bottom is loaded with stones and earth, stones 
alone if there are enough at hand, until the boat is 
sunk below the surface of the water several inches, the 
projecting stones indicating buoyancy. This nonde- 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 153 

script creation is then moved into deep water, in a 
'hole,'* as they call it, and a number of people standing 
on the bottom begin, as fast as possible, to pitch the 
stones to the side having the guard plank. In a few 
minutes that side begins to sink. The stones all slide 
over to the low side and the boat turns over. The peo- 
ple in the meantime rush to the high gunwale and 
crawl over, or else swim out of the way, which is the 
true conventional custom. The boat is then towed back 
to the shore, baled out, and is ready for studding. 
These are mortised into the gunwales, about three feet 
apart all around, the side planking is put on and 
caulked. 

"If to carry dry freight, a roof is sprung on, that is, 
curved about half an inch to a foot, the boards crosswise 
and full length. If cord wood, timber, hoop poles, 
staves, coal, or other freight not needing cover, is to be 
carried, the boat is left open, and is ready for loading 
as soon as the sides are put on. The draught will be 
two to three feet for a dry load, for timber of any 
kind about four feet. If for coal A stone or other min- 
eral, the draught may be nine feet. 

"A 'check-post' is set in, and braced by the cargo. 
The sides are held out against external pressure in the 
same manner, indeed the whole thing is only a water- 
proof covering for the load. An immense 'sweep,' 
fifty to sixty feet long, is mounted at the stern for 
steering, and a pair of shorter sweeps for pulling head- 
way, which in extreme cases may reach half a mile an 
hour. 

' ' This great ark floats to her destination, steered care- 
fully. 'How?' you will ask. In the strong current 
and slope of the river the boat crawls through the water. 



154 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

not as fast as a North River steamer, but at a rate of 
one to two feet a minute. How and why you may find 
out for yourself. The main thing is stopping these 
boats in a current of three to six miles an hour. To do 
this requires skill, dexterity and good judgment. To 
land, the bow of the boat is set quartering down stream. 
A rope 200 to 400 yards long is coiled in the stern of a 
skiff. A good man takes the oars, and the most active 
and coolest one at hand takes charge of the line, which 
runs out over the stern as the skiff is rowed ashore. As 
soon as the skiff strikes the shore the rear or line man 
turns over the rope coil, seizes the free end, springs 
past the oarsman, and runs up the bank to find some 
solid object to make fast to. A tree or large root, or 
some immovable object. A 'let go' hitch is made, and 
the signal given to begin 'checking,' which is a danger- 
ous operation. About three turns are made around the 
check-post, and the line fed out under such tension as 
it will stand. The smoke will sometimes rise from the 
post, caused by the friction. The boat begins to swing, 
and at the same time move toward the shore, and is 
gradually brought to rest with the bow or end up 
stream. If there is too much delay, and remember all 
this has to be done in a minute or two, the check man 
cries 'let go,' and the line man casts off, comes on board, 
the line is hauled in, and another attempt made after 
the boat can again be moved out and laid in position. 

"This is often done in the night. Landings are 
made, indeed must be made, at city wharves. The line 
man must find a ring bolt, the water-wheel beam of a 
steamboat, anything in sight to make fast to, and he 
does it. Protests do not go, he will hitch to anything, 
fight to retain his hold. Remember, he must be ready 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 155 

to let go at a signal from the boat. If his hitch gives 
way he is disgraced, if he cannot let go he is disgraced, 
if he falls in the river and don't drown he is disgraced. 
The ethics of the trade are distinct. You may laugh, 
but I would rather go aloft to furl a royal in a gale 
than to go out with a flat boat check line. 

"At the end of the journey the boat was taken to 
pieces and sold as sawn timber. The cost in former 
times was from $1.00 to $1.25 a lineal foot, and the 
wrecking value is half as much or more. It is all done 
now; railways reach the inland streams, timber is too 
dear to build flat boats with, and the men who operated 
them are in the cemeteries." 

I am beginning to think that water-craft, that is, 
human craft on the water, is much the same as it is in 
animals. It is absorbed in an insensible way through- 
out a term of years, or a lifetime^ and is not a specific 
thing to be learned, like building houses or shoeing 
horses. A kind of second nature. Put a water-skilled 
man on a steamer, a ship, in a boat, on a raft, or a life 
buoy, it is all the same. He knows the traits and 
. trends of the water, and how to keep on the surface of 
it. Geometry, dynamics, mechanics, or even a knowl- 
edge of Greek and Hebrew, will do him no more good 
than a heathen's talisman, unless he has been trained 
to the water, on and in the water. It is like gymnastics 
and circus riding, no one can do even a little of it with- 
out training, and they must begin young. There is a 
touch of heredity in it, too. I do not mean what is 
called navigation in its technical sense, finding the way 
in open seas. That is science, and not a very abstruse 
one at that, but how to clubhaul a ship, or land a flat 
boat, is another matter. 



156 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

A PITCH-PINE COUNTRY A SCREED ON SLAVERY HOW TO 

SET A TELEGRAPH POLE BORING OUT A FLY WHEEL 

HOW TO SETTLE A NEW COUNTRY 

PACIFIC COAST. 

At breakfast one morning my uncle 



announced his intention of going straight to New York. 

I was not sorry at his decision, because it was obvious 
he felt like Marius at the ruins of Carthage. His old 
remembrances were of a brighter period in this country, 
before the carpet baggers and the railways had changed 
all. I knew his estimate of what we call progress, and 
it was not all in harmony with popular opinion. I 
therefore asked some questions about his intended route, 
remarking that we would certainly pass through a rich 
country until we left the Gulf level. 

"Rich," said he, "look out for pitch pine, white clay 
and water. No one knows why there is not fifty feet 
of sedimentary deposit all over the country, especially 
from here to Mobile, which we will pass through, and 
perhaps there is, somewhere down below, but on top, 
pitch pine. This tree one may liken to the mangy 
dogs of Cairo, in Egypt, I mean, always associated with 
poverty. When it is not pitch pine it is cypress and 
water, but of good healthy timber and growth of any- 
thing, don't hope for it. You will not see an acre of 
good warm soil, or natural thrift, until we are some 
hundreds of feet above the Gulf. The French had a 
hard time to find the mouth of the Mississippi, from 
seaward, I mean, and a heroic courage in attempting to 
found a city or cities when they finally did get in. They 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 157 

knew, however, what was above. La Salle had come 
down the other way, and the explorers well knew they 
were in the door to a Continent. Their settlement 
aronnd here, and the development of the country, is the 
only creditable work the French ever performed. They 
are not a colonizing nation, always sighing and hoping 
for return to La Belle France, and no one can wonder, 
perhaps, at that. Here and in Lower Canada they 
'stuck it out,' as the saying is, and in the two climatic 
extremes of the country. How it was done I cannot 
imagine. ' ' 

The trip to Mobile verified my uncle's description; so 
did the city. From a prosperous shipping port, and 
great commercial city, it had become a wreck. Whole 
blocks with low brick buildings, iron shuttered, were 
quiet and desolate, grass in the streets, the wharves 
rotten, and the great, sullen, muddy Alabama River 
crawling by. Now and then an ill-rigged vessel loaded 
with pitch pine boards, perhaps some barrels of rosin, 
and some cotton from the interior, but not much. 

Formerly it was a nigger to a bale, or a bale to the 
nigger, now it is a bale to the farm with the "nigger" 
thrown in. There are cotton "patches," perhaps plan- 
tations, but not seen from the railway, the nigger 
"patch" is the rule. "There seems to be something 
the matter with this country," said I to my uncle, 
"things do not look right. It should be prosperous, 
and will be, perhaps, some time, but just now there is a 
kind of spell over it." 

"Yes, Tech 2 you are right that far, but don't attempt 
to analyze the matter. It involves sentiment, roguery, 
philosophy, biology, sociology and history j with a 
smattering of thievery thrown in. Slavery is at the 



158 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

bottom, not as a cause direct, but as a circumstance, 
one may say. Do you know what slavery is? In the 
abstract it is an inequality of human rights, but is not 
an inequality of conditions. A negro may be a slave, 
and more free than the man who owns him. Anti- 
slavery is a sentiment, often an illogical one. In one 
sense, and a strong sense, a soldier or sailor is a slave, 
so is the dependent man, and so are all men in the de- 
gree to which they must conform to the rules and laws 
of society. 

"Southern slavery, regulated by humane laws, as it 
might have been, and its worst features left to expire, 
as they would have done in time, would have been much 
better than a war that destroyed 350,000 men, gave the 
negroes a vote and a 'Freedman's Bureau.' It takes a 
great deal of slavery to balance a very little war, and 
not very much statesmanship to avoid both. 

"Note these telegraph poles all leaning inward, or 
toward the direction of strain. The Cincinnati Southern 
Railway was the first and almost the only line that set 
poles in that manner ; others set them to lean backward, 
away from the strain. Naturally, you would say, but 
wrong. When you drive a stake to sustain strain al- 
waj^s lean it toward the pull, not away from it, as 
ninety-nine in a hundred are driven." 

The last proposition was a new one to me, and when 
my uncle went on to make a sketch and show me how by 
leaning the poles as seemed the wrong way the fulcra 
were obviously strengthened. Compression, or down 
strain at the top, and upward strain at the bottom. It 
is perfectly simple, only common sense. 

It happened to be Sunday, and fortunately, too, be- 
cause we saw the "blackbird" element to the best ad- 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 159 

vantage. At each station, perched on fences, or sitting 
on logs or benches, were rows of negroes in their holiday 
attire. Little cotton "patches" right and left, then 
hills, and a beautiful country, hundreds of miles across, 
finally Birmingham, Alabama, where a sale of lots was 
going on, and people paying money in thousands that 
would not in their time come back in hundreds even. 
The "boom" idea, an insane kind of speculation, not 
based on reason, facts, or even common sense, born of 
a state of mind common to these people, isolated in 
trade, religion and politics. I heard two corner lots 
knocked down at $3,000 apiece that it is quite sure are 
not worth $300 now, and were not then by any logical 
reasoning that could be arrived at. 

In time we passed through Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, 
Philadelphia and New York, the notebook worn, well 
filled, except room for a summary by my uncle, whose 
observations were not like mine, of the present only, 
but of the past as well. 

"Tech," said he, "a man is a creation of his en- 
vironment, so are his works. A sparse population is 
provincial, and must be so, also is diversified, a mixture, 
so to speak. One time I saw in Kentucky a flywheel 
bored with a sweep turned by a negro. They had a cast- 
iron boring bar passing through two floors of the 
building. Wooden bearings were made by bolting 
blocks against the floor beams. The bar extended about 
three feet above the upper floor, had a sweep of wood 
clamped on the upper end. The bar was suspended 
vertically by a screw-threaded rod extending up to the 
third floor, fitted with turnbuckles to raise the bar for 
feeding. The flywheel was laid on the lower floor, and 
'trammed' by the bar, a cutter was wedged into a slot, 



160 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

two negroes turned the sweep, another worked the turn- 
buckle, and a white man watched the operation. The 
wheel was bored in half a day at an expense of not 
more than three dollars, with tools not worth twenty- 
five dollars in all, and was bored true. 

"Twenty miles away at Cincinnati (the wheel boring 
was done in Maysville, Kentucky), there were being 
made steam fire engines, also some very creditable work 
on mathematical instruments. That is what I call 
diversity, the crude and capable in close relation. It 
is just so in other things. All kinds of men and all 
kinds of ideas come together in the western country. 
Madame Trollope, Anthony Trollope's mother, lived in 
Cincinnati then ; a Dr. Mussey there was one of the 
foremost surgeons, so were other doctors then famous. 
Tosso, who lived across the river, was a famous Italian 
violinist and musician. Elbowing these people were the 
Indians, the unspeakable corncracker, the blasphemous 
flat boatmen. No such medley ever met in the Eastern 
States. Colonel Carter of Carterville, pronounced ' Catah' 
of 'Catahville, ' in Kentucky, sometimes met psalm- 
singing Hezekiah Hickings, of Salem, Mass. John 
Murrel, professional murderer, of Mississippi, preached 
the gospel when there were no rich victims, but this 
section, now the middle of the country, while it had 
diversity at the time of its making up, had what the 
extreme West never did, that is, the honest and indus- 
trious farmer with as much land as he could use, and no 
more. 

"Illinois was the first to experience modern methods. 
A railway grant took a great swath right down through 
the middle of the State, thousand acre farms began to 
appear, the 'boomer,' too 2 came, but he was a mild 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 161 

specimen compared to his counterpart of our time. He 
got up towns, marked out theaters, court houses, ex- 
changes, churches, and all that on paper, but the people 
pressed in so hard that the boomers' schemes were ac- 
tually carried out, at least materialized as the spiritual- 
ists say, to an extent that a man of thirty who bought 
town lots, when fifty years of age saw his money come 
back again. 

"There were no gold mines, no fruit culture at $300 
an acre of product, and $900 for the land, no manufac- 
tures that were to pay 200 per cent, a year, but only 
farming and cattle, so the boomer was curbed in re- 
sources, his fancy could not roam beyond 100 bushels 
of corn to the acre, and a railway on two sides of each 
farm. 

"At the Missouri things began to change rapidly, and 
from there on to the Pacific Ocean the settlement and 
development of the country followed a different plan, 
but this we will see some time, health and opportunity 
permitting. I want some salt-water service now, and 
will not expect an attack of land fever for some time 
to come. When I do I will come ashore on the other 
side of the continent. This railway travel I don't like." 

My uncle never forgot and never changed his plans. 
"Do not drift with circumstances," he would say, 
"anchor or sail, " and this he did. When he mentioned 
the Pacific Coast the thing was done, and now for some 
long months in the "works," self denial and hard work, 
but after all the next most attractive thing to roaming 
with my worthy uncle. 



162 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

ON THE PACIFIC COAST TALKING SVENSK MOVING A 

COUNTRY CANADIAN PACIFIC VANCOUVER 

HOW CLIMATES ARE MADE. 

A year and a half gone I found lying at 



the back of my draughting board one morning a letter 
bearing the well-known chirography of my uncle, a 
foreign stamp, evidences of wear, and bulky for a letter 
of his. It was from Southampton, England, and ran 
thus, omitting the head: 

"We go out to the west coast of America from here; 
to Vancouver. The ship is there to be turned over to 
new owners, and I am going ashore, north if alone, south 
if you will bring that everlasting notebook and join me. 
We go through the Straits, and fifty days from now 
should be in Burrards Inlet, they call it (outlet it 
should be) for the Fraser River, but geography aside 
the point is high enough to start from. Write me at 
Vancouver. ' ' 

The bulk was made up of a map. I counted off the 
degrees of longitude, and was appalled at the distances, 
but here of all other trips was the one desired, and de- 
cision did not lag. The notebook was looked up, other 
preparations made, four long weeks, and off. Here is 
the first note : 

1 wanted a look at St. Paul and St. An- 
thony again, and went there, then turned off at a right 
angle to Winnipeg, and on the .way there saw the wheat 
country and Scandinavians. 

They elect Norse congressmen somewhere up in this 
region, and should, I think, have several if fairly rep- 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 163 

resented. Half or more of the population bore the im- 
press of ' ' Scandia ' ' in appearance and tongue, speaking 
the strange idiom which no one except Bill Nye ever 
learned to imitate. Here for a divergence, let it be 
written that the nearer the analogy between two tongues 
the more difficult it is to learn both. A Russian may 
ask you to put from two to four v's in front of a word, 
v-v-v-vitch for example, and after a struggle or two it is 
done completely, just as the Russian did it. 

A German may ask you to spell horse with a p and an 
/ together, pferde. You do it with a trial or two, and 
can ever after in good German, but let a Chinaman give 
you a pair of his monosyllabic words that sound like 
chi ching, and a hundred trials floors you. The gentle 
Swede tells you his language is latt at Vara, "light to 
learn," which is nearly English, and you can set that 
down to begin with. It seems simple, but it is not. The 
cadence ? inflection, modulation, or whatever it may be 
called^ is impossible. A thousand elusive attempts will 
do no good, a breath betrays you. It is just like music, 
in fact a musician learns such sounds much easier. I 
do not mean the language is musical, although that 
might be said of the Swedish branch. It is a curious 
indescribable sound, ten times as difficult to learn as a 
pile of consonants in Polish. 

These Scandinavians go up there into 

Dakota to raise wheat. They also raise the soil, and 
ship it off by rail. While this thin or thick layer of 
loam was made, throughout many centuries as a buffalo 
pasture, these animals remove nothing. Their manure, 
carcases, horns and hoofs remained on or in the ground. 
So with all vegetable growth, nothing was taken away, 
but now wheat is grown. The grain is sent away, the 



164 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

straw is burned, or sent away also. All animal growth 
is sent away, and the essential elements of the soil goes 
along. In twenty years more the whole top will be 
gone, the people, too, unless they are buried here. It 
will, like the tobacco districts in Eastern Virginia, re- 
quire a century of rest. The country "seems" all 
right just now, but it is not, or at least will not be long. 

Winnipeg, Red River of the North, first post of the 
Hudson Bay Company and the Canadian Pacific Rail- 
way, are found after a long ride over a ramshackle 
railway, with an interlude of customs inspection of bag- 
gage — an intolerable nuisance. This straggling town of 
Winnipeg betokens in various ways its perennial or half 
yearly business. It is of the hibernating class. In the 
winter the streets are paved with ice, and the country 
clothed in snow, the thermometer hovering about zero, 
sometimes there, but oftener far below, away down to 
thirty or even forty minus. 

The Canadian Pacific Railway is mainly on the Ameri- 
can system, with some features of the British, and so 
far as I can see is by far the best of the trans-continental 
routes. It is a complete line for one thing, under one 
management from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Puget 
Sound. There are not many differences from the Ameri- 
can lines of the best class, in so far as machinery, car- 
riages, and so on, if we compare with the best lines, but 
there is a good deal of difference in what the naval folks 
call the ' ' personnel. ' ' 

I had just got settled into a comfortable seat in a glass- 
lined smoking room at Winnipeg, when an official of the 
porter class halted in front of me, and after a military 
salute delivered the following address : ' ' Sir, I am to in- 
form you that among your baggage there is a roll of 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 165 

wraps with a cane and umbrella in the middle that can be 
drawn out; the company cannot be responsible for these, 
but will carry them at your risk, or I will remove and 
bring them in here to be placed at your own risk." 

Behind the train at night we could see at all times 
lights moving on the line, and for explanation we were 
informed that a patrol went over the road every time 
a train passed, night or day. The line is built on an 
embankment from four to five feet high across all plains, 
hundreds of miles of this, to prevent snow blockade. By 
the way, there is a bit of philosophy in this matter, and 
good philosophy too. There are no snow fences or 
guards, such as are seen on the lines to the southward. 
There is as much or more snow to contend with, but 
these embankments cause a break in the drift. The 
snow shoots over and piles up beyond, but does not stop 
on the railway. In the Selkirk range of mountains, 
where there is the same snowfall as in the Sierra 
Mountains, the line is kept clear by snow sheds and 
powerful plow engines that follow up and down during 
the time of a heavy snow. 

Speaking of snow sheds, they have $3,000,000 worth 
of them on this route, all in the Pacific range of moun- 
tains. They are wholly unlike those to the south, are 
not snow sheds at all, but "avalanche guards." The 
mountains are built on a different plan up here, 
twice as precipitous, and no one can see why the sides 
do not run down into the valleys. The guards consist of 
diverting walls in dangerous places, and in addition the 
sheds, which are arranged to ' ' jump ' ' the avalanche over 
the line. They have but one slope, corresponding to the 
mountain side, but more flat, and are made of masses 



166 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

of timber, strong enough to shed earth and rocks as well 
as snow. 

In time we came to and crossed the Columbia River, 
to my surprise. What it is doing away round here in 
this part of the world a map only will explain, and 
navigable too. It curves away to the north, and is a 
better river here for steamboats than three hundred 
miles farther down, where it goes tumbling over rapids 
that defy steamboats. Then finally the Fraser River 
Canyon, Burrard's Inlet, Saltwater and Vancouver, B. C. 
There is another Vancouver in Washington, on the Co- 
lumbia River, an old fortress and not much more, but 
here is a city, a young one, but with many of the at- 
tributes of age, or of progress rather. Thirty-five miles 
of streets, as many miles of water pipes, and every 
house in the "new town" is of brick and stone. No 
shanties, and none permitted. It is a theoretical town, 
laid down at the beginning to a definite plan, and the 
specifications strictly adhered to. A forest was here 
only nine years ago, now quays and steamer lines to 
China, Japan, Australia, Fiji Islands, Hawaii and all 
coast ports north and south. 

I learned all this before my arrival, and at the Hotel 
Vancouver where I had the happiness to meet my uncle 
in good health and spirits, "getting his sea legs off," 
as he said. 

A look around here develops the fact 

that there is an old or older Vancouver half a mile away, 
made of wood, containing saw mills, shops and a lake 
or pond, communicating in some way with the bay. It 
is a typical timber town, one of the kind that burns 
up clean once in a dozen years, permitting improvements 
and extensions. A town built with wooden houses must 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 167 

by the law of chances burn up whenever the houses are 
near enough together to permit a conflagration. It is 
the same everywhere, and old Vancouver has burned 
up a time or two. The new one will not burn up, it has 
been built as an investment by rich people, some of 
them English noblemen, who are stockholders in the 
Canadian Pacific Railroad. The revenues of this line 
are paid to the shareholders, and carried to a surplus 
account, now large enough, I was informed, to pay div- 
idends for four years if no earnings were made in that 
time. I am skeptical about this, but if may be so. 

The weather for the season was warm 

and comfortable; we were in the latitude of Newfound- 
land, about 49 north, and this subject was referred to 
my uncle. 

"Climate," said he, "is a water problem, the coast 
is what the sea makes it. Here the water is coming 
from the Sea of Japan, and is warm. The country is 
the same back to the mountains, where the wind is 
broken, and sent up, dissipated we may call it, takes 
the temperature due to a high altitude and descends 
again cold and frozen. Look at the New England coast, 
cold in winter as Greenland, and compare with Great 
Britain, four to six degrees north of there, with a mild 
climate in comparison. The Gulf Stream of warm water 
flows parallel to the coast up to Cape Hatteras, then 
diverges outward, permitting the cold water coming 
around from the coast of Labrador and Newfoundland 
to wedge inside. This chills the whole country. 

"The Gulf Stream takes a course across the Atlantic 
Ocean, sweeps past the British Isles, touching most on 
Ireland, then crosses the North Sea, and switches around 
so as to touch Norway, not much, but enough to keep 



168 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

the Dover Fjord open all winter, while four or five 
hundred miles south of there, in Sweden, it freezes ice 
six feet thick, perhaps twelve, I have seen it six. 

"Climate is an accident, except as governed by alti- 
tude, and even that is not a constant cause, I mean in 
assumed latitudes. Of course it grows hot toward the 
equator, but what are these little variations of tem- 
perature when not measured by our susceptibilities, less 
than 200 degrees, when the range in a laboratory is about 
4,000. Wrought iron melts at 3,000 degrees above zero, 
and mercury at 38 below. Both are metals. 

"We are poor weak organisms, tender as to tempera- 
ture, so is all animal life, except microbes; they will 
endure a range of 600 degrees, so it is said. I have no 
acquaintance with microbes, however, and give the facts 
on hearsay. The fact is, and you can set it down in 
your notes, that there is no kind of physical fact we 
deal with so blindly as that of temperature. We re- 
gard one point of the scale from zero to 100 degrees as 
the base, and everything else above and below as abnor- 
mal. Mercury melts at 38 degrees below zero, and water 
at 32 degrees above zero, and evaporates at 212. Which 
is the normal or natural temperature of these? We 
happen to live, as before said, between and 100 de- 
grees, an^ measure everything else accordingly." 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 169 



CHAPTER XXV. 

A CRACKED COUNTRY — IMAGINATIVE HISTORY — A STORM 

FACTORY EUROPEAN DRESS A MISTAKE IN 

HOPS THE NORMAL LINE. 

There is a strange mixture of land and 



sea in this country, about Puget Sound, and not only 
here, but all the way to Alaska. It seems that there was 
an oversight in the geographical make-up of this coast, 
there being no harbors from here to San Francisco, 
nearly a thousand miles down the coast, and the whole 
harbor accommodation that should exist, is concentrated 
here in the Sound. 

Some recent writer says all these water-ways about 
the Sound are "fissures," and proves it too, by sections, 
profiles and words, that is, shows that the configuration 
is not that produced by water errosion, but by con- 
vulsions of nature, that cracked the country into fissures 
that filled up with water, some of them wholly, others 
partially. 

This is a novel theory to fit over four thousand square 
miles of water-ways 2 sometimes called the American 
Mediterranean, and has for proof the extraordinary fact 
that the depth of the water is very uniformly in pro- 
portion to its width, or is just the opposite of basins or 
channels formed by ordinary causes. It is a curious 
proposition^ in which the author says all this could be 
done in twelve thousand years. 

My uncle had, as usual, been looking into the history 
and affairs of the country up here, and gave me quite 
a start in it, as follows : 



170 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

"This country," said he, "is the home 

of old lies. There have been more cock and bull stories 
told by old navigators that came around here, than 
belongs to any other new country. The Straits, here 
called San Juan De Fuca, were discovered, and the first 
entrance made here, about two hundred and forty-five 
years ago. De Fuca went home and made up a lot of 
lies of a highly picturesque nature. 

"Among other things, the old pirate reported that he 
had found a northwest passage, that is, a way around 
the American continent with other stories about endless 
gold and silver, a country of riches and rare products, 
an El Dorado, if his story had been true. The desire to 
astound other people with what one has seen or dis- 
covered is an astonishing human trait, commonly ex- 
plained on the ground of the narrator's vanity, but my 
opinion is that it comes from the propensity to deceive, 
inborn, and suppressed only by a higher civilization. 

"Another old Spanish navigator, De Fonte, had been 
here before De Fuca, about fifty years earlier. He pre- 
pared the first edition of lies, afterwards revised and 
extended by De Fuca. De Fonte says he met with a 
Yankee skipper up here and bought from him a chart 
of the coast, for $10,000, which chart was lost. This I 
mention as a sample of the old chap's imagination. 

"Captain Cook came up here before he was killed at 
the Sandwich Islands, and told about the first truth re- 
specting the country, but his death prevented such use 
of his narrative as would have led to an intelligent ex- 
planation of his discoveries. 

"Then came old Vancouver, who sailed up past the 
mouth of the Columbia River, declared there was no 
such a stream, but by accident he tumbled into the 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 171 

Sound here 3 and then went to work in earnest, and sur- 
veyed the whole water line. I suspect he was a Dutch- 
man, at any rate his methods were Hollandish. This 
was only a hundred years ago. Just think of it, and 
what a single century, the span of longest life for one 
person, can bring forth." 

We went over to Victoria, a town that 

might be called "Metamorpho. " There are 20,000 peo- 
ple here now; all quiet, staid, respectable citizens, and 
there are a good many characteristics of a British town, 
but there are as many people here as there were about 
forty years ago when there was a great "mining boom" 
on the Fraser River. Then thousands flocked in from 
California mainly, a swarming out of the placer mines 
there, then getting bare in that country. Then Vic- 
toria was a town of shanties and tents, whiskey, 
gambling, fighting and turmoil. Now it is just the 
opposite. A sleepy town they call it, but that is no 
description. It is not "sleepy," but orderly, and an 
exception to the rule thereabouts of struggling, noise, 
disorder and "progress," as it is called. 

There is a tolerably large iron works here, and we 
were much astonished to find the very latest machine 
tools' for plate working, such as hydraulic punches, 
shears and riveting machines, all of English make. A 
set of marine engines of about 800 horse power were 
nearly done, and a very creditable job in every way. 
There were some new things here, as one always finds 
in an inland or isolated works, not things to be de- 
scribed, but the usual "kinks" thought out and in- 
vented by men who in the cities would be employing 
their leisure time at a theater or beer hall. 



172 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

About here begins, as my uncle says, the worst coast 
in the world for winter weather. "Cape Flattery," 
said he 1 "is a storm center where is hatched and sent 
out the storms that cross the continent and sweep down 
the coast to the Mexican line. Here the fog begins, and 
thickens to the northmost point of Alaska. The coun- 
try up to Sitka may be worth something, but the rest of 
it nothing, unless for mineral products, and that is 
doubtful if the climate and other untoward circum- 
stances are taken into account. 

"There are no reasons for going to Alaska so long as 
there are other places open to settlers; I mean to live 
there. It affords a grand scenic summer trip for four 
months, and that is the most of it. There is fish, coal 
and some timber there, not to mention the poor seals 
that are butchered to make a stiff, uncomfortable kind 
of clothing, not half as good or sensible as the Chinese 
produce with cotton batting and cheap cloth. A seal- 
skin coat is to the wearer what Alaska is to the United 
States, a matter of ornament. In fact the core and 
kernel of the whole purchase are at this time two islands, 
St. Paul and St. George, where the seals are taken, a 
hundred thousand a year at these places alone."* 

"Human dress," said my uncle, "is a mystery to all 
philosophy. The more civilized we become, the more 
illogical grows the method of dress. Look at our Euro- 
pean and American ideas of the matter. Over your 
breast, there and up to your neck, only your underwear. 
The most vital part of the human organism left nearly 
bare to accommodate a breast pin, ornamental shirt studs 
and a necktie. Around the loins, the vital center of 



*This was written in 1895, previous to the discovery of gold in Alaska. 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 173 

the system, so to speak, there is a tolerably well-devised 
air pump. Lean forward and then back, and you will 
find a draught of cold air drawn in and expelled upward 
along the spine. The Latin branch of our people, many 
of them, wear a sash around the waist to prevent this 
air pumping, and enjoy accordingly immunity from 
lumbago and renal diseases. 

"Around on your back there are two buttons. What 
for no one can explain, but they must be there. I could 
tell you if it were worth while how these buttons came 
there, but am ashamed to admit having wasted time to 
find out. Then there are stiff cylindrical hats, sharp- 
toed and broad-toed shoes, with much more that admits 
of no rational explanation, so that sealskin coats after 
all are not so much of an absurdity." 

From Victoria we went to Seattle, Ta- 

coma and Portland, noting things on the way, and prin- 
cipal among these was a feverish unrest, and "schemes" 
of all kinds that seemed to engross public attention. 
Some time, not very far hence, people will wonder how 
little they know of what was to take place in the in- 
dustrial affairs of this country. There is not a man 
here who will not set down and map out the future of 
these towns, the Sound country, and if pressed a little 
he will include the Pacific Coast, and even the rest of 
the continent in his forecast. One rule applies here as 
everywhere else, the native is no good judge of his own 
country. The passing stranger is your best prophet if 
he be qualified as a prophet at all, and as we are 
strangers some prophecy is in order. It may not be a 
good prophecy, but it is cheap. 

In the first place this Sound country having respect 
to its natural conditions will become one of diversified 



174 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

and normal industry, much more so than any other part 
of the Pacific Coast. There is good land, a mild climate, 
plenty of timber, water and coal, a mixed population, 
a free intercourse with the world. It is a rich country, 
capable of thrift, and there will be no tendency to 
special industries. All will flourish, and happily so, be- 
cause a manufacturing, cotton, sugar or fruit-growing 
country, however natural or necessary, is by no means 
so desirable as one of diversified industries and products. 

They raise hops up here, and at a profit, but not a 
great profit now. About ten years ago there was a 
failure of the hop crop in Europe and all over the 
world, indeed, except on this coast. The price went up 
to a fabulous rate 2 more than a dollar a pound and the 
hop growers found themselves rich by accident. Not 
one in ten of them knew what to do with the money 
they got, and set out to use it in various ways that led 
to their ruin. One old German, who had enough hops 
to bring $50,000, said: "What does a Dutchman like 
me want mit fifty tousand tollars? Tat will shpoil any 
Dutchman, and ruins ter hop pisness, you mind that 
now." This turned out true. The brewers could not 
buy hops at the price, hunted up substitutes, and quit 
using hops to this day 2 but this was not all. Every one 
all over the country who had land planted hops, and 
the next summer the price would not pay for picking. 

This story, related by a traveler, amused my uncle, 
who saw in the circumstance a text for one of his ser- 
mons, thus set down in my book : 

"All human affairs move on a horizontal line, per- 
haps not a horizontal one, but ascending or descending, 
regularly, however, and wherever prices, or anything 
else, is pressed above this line the same thing must 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 175 

descend equally below to fill out the diagram, so to call 
it. The space above and below the normal line must be 
the same. Now this applies to everything of an econ- 
omic nature, as well as the price of hops. If one man, 
or a number of men, get very rich, that is, rise above 
the line in wealth, a corresponding volume of the popu- 
lation must go below the line. One man above, if he 
is very rich, may send hundreds below, and if hops go 
up to one dollar a pound, or eight times their true 
worth, call it eight points above the line, then they must 
sink eight points below, not, in one year, perhaps, but 
in a reasonable time. It is a law of nature, and, as I 
said; is not confined to hops. We see this law at work 
even in education. In countries where the most learned 
men have flourished there is a corresponding number 
below the line. 

"The tendency of all natural laws is to equality, and 
the penalty for divergence is found in this balancing-up 
process. Two years ago we had attained a culminating 
point in speculation, extravagance and fictitious values, 
and began levelling up by sending many products, as 
well as innumerable firms and persons, below the line. 
There is no rest anywhere, and blessed little common 
sense in this struggle for existence. The broad signs of 
coming disaster are not learned or heeded. We are 
children in such knowledge, and stupid children at 
that." 



176 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

MACHINE TOOL MAKERS FLEXIBLE DRILLING MACHINES — 

GRINDSTONE FRAMES BALANCING MANDRELS 

AN IDEA IN SALT CELLARS. 

At Seattle, Tacoma and Portland we 



went into various machine works, and as this is a field 
of especial interest to myself, I propose to fill up a 
section of the note-book with what was seen, and the 
impressions gained, especially the latter. It is a tolerably 
risky matter to criticise shop manipulation, because 
there are various ways of doing almost everything, and 
the best way is often a matter of opinion, determinable 
only by wide experience and observation. 

The most unprogressive among all kinds of machine 
work is machine tool making. It is the branch to which 
is directed the highest skill, and in all countries is the 
field of the best mechanics, but for some reason tool 
makers come the farthest from logical conclusions of any 
class engaged in the machine business. There is about 
as much science in their art as there is in making worm 
fences in Virginia. They don't even know, and will not 
attempt to find out, the strains that occur in metal cut- 
ting, and of course never compute sections to resist 
strains, unless it be in a press or like machine. A lathe 
spindle may be two, three or four inches in diameter, 
and drilling spindles the same. This last mention brings 
up a particular point, noticeable in nearly all drilling 
machines, that of ' ' torsional elasticity. ' ' 

If a drilling machine is employed for boring, as is 
common in this Western country, its operative function 
is not much different from the head stock of an engine 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 177 

lathe, but if we look at the two we see a vast differene- . 
It would be pretty hard for a tool maker to explain why 
he should not put the same gearing on a drilling spindle 
that he does on an engine-lathe spindle, but he does 
nothing of the kind, in this country at least. In Eng- 
land the rule was formerly, and may be yet, to use the 
same gearing for lathes and drilling machines, introduc- 
ing in the latter a pair of mitre wheels to make the 
angle. This was a very good rule, and saved a good deal 
in patterns and drawings, produced a powerful machine 
with the torsional elasticity confined to the mitre wheels 
and projecting spindle, not quite as stiff as a lathe, but 
near it. 

Compare this with the back gearing on a second 
shaft, two to four feet long, and in the case of radial 
drilling machines on a second or third shaft, sometimes 
with as much as ten feet of light shafting between the 
power and the work. A radial or a crane-drilling ma- 
chine geared in this manner with a great sole plate, a 
heavy gib bar and a spindle two to two and a half inches 
diameter is a caricature on machine design. 

If one asks a question he is informed that the drilling 
machine is a "powerful one," powerful for what? To 
turn drills? For that is nearly the sole function to be 
performed. "Drills true" we are told. How drills 
true? A machine does not guide its drills. The drills 
guide themselves, and if there is a deviation the ma- 
chine multiplies the error,and makes it worse. Of course 
the work and spindle supports must be so sustained a? .0 
withstand the thrust of drilling, that is, the framing 
must not bend or yield, but as to lateral stability or 
guidance, these elements or functions are not provided 
by the machine at all. 



178 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

Let us consider a drill itself as an implement. It has 
two short cutting edges balanced across its point or axis. 
These cutting edges are guided by four agencies: the 
burrowing point, the bearing of the edges themselves, 
the lateral fit of the drill in the hole and the support 
of the outer end by the drilling spindle. 

Now among these elements of "guidance" what does 
the machine itself provide? It holds the outer end of 
the drill central with the hole "as it was started," 
presses it forward, and nothing more. If the drill de- 
viates this support causes more deviation, as we can 
see in rachet drilling. It is a blind following of the 
course. There is, however, another machine function, 
that of starting drills at a right angle to the plane of 
the table, convenient, and hence important, but with 
all allowances it is easy to see that a "powerful drilling 
machine" is an idea, not a fact, except as to force of 
revolution. 

This divergence to drilling has used up 

about ten times the intended space, and we pass to grind- 
stones. These I find mostly in wooden boxes or troughs, 
that by the nature of the material must be made of 
angular section, but some of the frames are made of 
iron, and have on the side the name of a notable firm 
of tool makers^ but the form in this case is circular or 
semi-circular to fit around the stone. What for? This 
shape destroys the base, and this must either be ex- 
panded again, producing a new set of curves, or some 
kind of legs must be screwed on to get a footing. The 
result is a grotesque-looking soup-bowl affair that costs 
a good deal for pattern making, and is inconvenient to 
mould, handle, and awkward in use. 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 179 



The ' ' box ' ' fits around the stone, so that if a tool falls 
in it will jam the stone, and cannot be got out. There 
is no room to eatch water or hold sand, except a small 
pool in the center, from which the stone picks it up, and 
casts it out over the grinder or on the floor. Suppose 
that on the contrary these iron grindstone boxes were 
rectangular in form, ran straight down to a flange that 
rests on the floor, the corners affording a space to hold 
water and slush. Such a form would look well, and be 
well ; I have seen them and tried them. 

1 noticed the men grinding on the ap- 
proaching side of the stones, and asked the reason. 
"Takes the wire edge off" was the answer. That settled 
it. A wire edge on a metal cutting tool is good. Where 
I learned my trade we oil stoned the tools after grind- 
ing, which it is true took off the "wire enge, " but the 
object was something else. The tool was smoothed just 
at the edge and its cutting friction reduced. 

The reason that men grind in front of a stone is that 
there is less pressure to apply, but this is a poor com- 
pensation for being slopped all over with dirty water, 
and running the risk of smashed fingers or worse. So 
it has always been in machine shops. But observe a pro- 
fessional grinder and see if he works on the fronts to 
so call it. He would not think of such a thing, even if 
he were grinding machine tools. 

To stop fault finding for a time, I hap- 
pened today on a little matter or expedient that went 
far to direct attention from tool criticism, and some- 
thing so good that I felt compelled to hurry back to the 
hotel and submit it to my uncle. It is common, or so 
far as I know, the universal rule in balancing pulleys 
or wheels to fit them on a mandrel that fills the bore, and 



180 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 



then roll the mandrel on the ways, marking the high 
or light side. These mandrels cost a good deal and a 
good many are required for holes of different size. The 
thing I found was a man balancing pulleys with all 
kinds of bore on one mandrel. He would put a pulley 
of four inches bore on a two-inch mandrel or piece of 
shaft, and go on just the same. The rolling action 
seemed to be even more sensitive when the mandrel did 
not fit the hole. I was amazed, also disgusted. Here 
is my uncle's idea of the matter: 

"There is nothing strange in this, we are all slaves of 
habit, with a limited power of reasoning, and are always 
blinded by familiarity. No one reasoned that matter 
out. Some lazy fellow, or some one in a hurry 2 stumbled 
on that idea when trying to scamp work. I can see how 
it will do as well or better even, than if the balancing 
shaft fitted the bore, now that you mention it, but never 
thought of it before in forty years' experience. It is 
'leaving off,' that is, omitting parts, and is for that 
reason opposed to the natural idea or tendency which 
is to add on something, but the matter is not done yet. 
You have it down in your note-book, in your head and 
in mine, but there are by the census report about sixty 
million, nine hundred thousand, nine hundred and nine- 
ty-seven people left to learn it. How long do you think 
it will take for this to go around ? Go back to that shop 
in five years from now, and you will perhaps find them 
carefully turning up special mandrels to fit the bore 
of each pulley or wheel to be balanced. It may require 
a pick to get a joke into a Scotchman's head, but it 
requires a pile driver to penetrate the crust of custom. 

"Please hand me that salt cellar? I want to use it 
for an illustration. It is a shaking one, and inside is a 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 181 

small battering ram to pulverize and loosen the salt, 
but even with that you cannot shake out any. It is caked 
hard, and from here to New York you will not find one 
much better. Salt absorbs moisture, and melts to the 
extent of the particles adhering together, "packing" 
we call it. Now what is the logical preventative for this ? 
Obviously some substance to take up the moisture, starch 
for example. Put twenty per cent of starch in the salt, 
and it will flow like sand or gunpowder in all weathers. 
Do you think that is new? Not by any means, every 
fool should know this much, and hundreds, perhaps 
thousands, have been informed of it, but it remains in 
the occult field of the -unknowable for all the rest. Now 
you can discern what is to become of your balancing 
mandrel problem." 

This was hard, this ruthless theory of my uncle, but 
it is true, and brings to mind the Hero engine of 300 
B. C, just now in a modified form coming to the front 
as a motive machine, but there are exceptions, not in the 
useful arts unhappily. If the beaux on the boulevard 
in Paris put on square-toed boots, they will appear in 
Halifax and Sitka by course of mail. If hats have an 
inch added to their brim diameter 3 or as much taken 
off, the change goes directly around the world, and all 
imitate the fashion. It is only useful things that travel 
so slow. 

1 wonder what the reason may be why 

line shafting all over this country, so far as we have 
seen, is coupled with keyed-on flanges, not even clamp 
couplings. I brought up the subject once or twice, and 
in answer to inquiry brought out a discussion of the 
merits, cost, and holding power of compression and 
flange couplings, but no hint whatever that would show 



182 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

that people about here know what compression or clamp 
couplings "are for." This is just a little strange, when 
one finds, on the other hand, any number of ingenious 
expedients invented and applied to all kinds of pur- 
poses. No one 2 however, seems to have discovered that 
clamp couplings convert the making of line shafting 
to a "manufacture," and this is the key to any system 
of cheap production; but then, organized manufacture 
of any kind is in its germ state here, and must be for 
some time to come. There is no market to permit dupli- 
cation, and here is the greatest impediment to local pro- 
duction. I am expecting to find other impediments be- 
fore we get to San Diego, or the Mexican line, but there 
is one quality that goes far to compensate for organized 
industry, and that is a restless vigor and boldness that 
makes one man count for two in some other parts of 
this country. 



CHAPTER XXVII. 

BRAHMANISM A HIGH COUNTRY SOMETHING ABOUT 

MIRACLES HYPNOTISM A NOVEL TYPE OF STEAM- 
BOATS IMPROVING A RIVER. 



At the hotel in T a coma we found a num- 
ber of foreigners, mostly Englishmen, travelers "taking 
in ' ' and doing the country, as one of them said. Among 
others a sedate-looking man that his companions called 
"Brahma," a name bestowed as we learned because of 
his belief in the faith of that name. To myself, no doubt 
to most other people, this seemed a most miraculous 
and heathenish idea, and I mentioned as much to my 
uncle. It was the greatest mistake I ever made. My 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 183 

uncle I knew had been in India, and noted among other 
things the faith of the people there, at least he notes 
everything, and as religion is the most prominent feature 
of social life in India I might have been more cautious, 
and first learned his views of the Brahma matter. 

"A Brahma!" said he, "what of that? What do you 
and the rest who are quizzing this man know of Braman- 
ism? When Egypt was young, a thousand years before 
Greece and Rome, these people had progressed farther 
in the study of the human mind and being than any 
other people have to this day. The center of Brahman 
faith is in Thibet, where no one goes, and no one can 
go, to stay at least. ■ It lies 14,000 feet above the sea, 
and demands physical and anatomical conditions that 
came of evolution, lungs to hold twice as much air for 
one thing. A few people, perhaps not a dozen in all, of 
our race have penetrated this country, and not one per- 
son in a million of them knows what Brahmanism means. 

"As I said, five thousand years ago Hindoo philoso- 
phers had progressed farther in fundamental knowledge 
than we have to-day. Their country was covered with 
fine cities, canals, reservoirs, terraced gardens, temples 
and palaces, so graceful and beautiful that the best we 
can do now is to make imitations of them. They had 
little scientific knowledge, and so much greater becomes 
their achievements, especially as all these things were 
done without lying, cheating, murder and other con- 
comitants of our modern civilization, at least there is 
no record or tradition of such vices. 

"I have seen the mango seed planted in India, and 
in thirty minutes grow to a tree before our eyes. Leger- 
demain you call it. I have seen it, or thought I saw it. 
What does it mean? A power over the human mind 



184 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

of which we have no knowledge except a mere fringe we 
call hypnotism, and that a mystery. The miracle was 
not performed for money, but for the same reasons that 
Christ performed his miracles, and was followed by a 
sermon that lifted the human mind far above the plane 
fixed by our Western sciences. 

"I am not of a credulous nature, and believe in the 
immutability of physical laws, as any one dealing with 
modern science and mechanics must do, otherwise be con- 
sidered a fool, but when it comes to the laws that govern 
the human mind, and the relations that life bears to 
matter, we must go to the Brahman to learn. 

"The man who planted the mango tree had been do- 
ing that very same thing his whole life, so had his 
father and grandfather before him, so had his pro- 
genitors for thousands of years before. The mango 
tree is an inconsequential matter, but the power that 
made it grow, blossom, bear fruit, wither and disappear 
in sixty minutes, that is the point. The man had no 
clothing to exceed a dime in value; his food, a cup of 
rice, was not worth two cents, and these things were 
given to him. His business was to study the human 
mind, and this he had done to some purpose. 

"Another man would cast a coil of rope upward in 
the air, where it would remain rigid; then he would 
climb up the rope. Don't laugh at this. Thousands of 
people have seen the same thing, or thought they did. 
There was no stage or stage apparatus, no gas light, or 
anything to promote deception. All was done in the 
open air, not for pay, as I before said, but as an experi- 
ment on the human perceptions, and now I come to the 
point. A people who have thus studied the human 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 185 

mind and soul of man are very apt to attain to a high 
religion and system of morals. 

"No one of you who are laughing at our friend knows 
what the term Brahma means. Neither do I. I am not 
advanced enough in knowledge and the powers of per- 
ception to understand it, but one thing I can explain, it 
does not mean a "thing," a creed or even a condition 
that can be expressed in the terms of our language and 
modes of thought. 

"Our friend is not a Brahman, he cannot be. He has 
only attained a decent respect for a wisdom of which 
he is conscious. He has no doubt seen jugglers in the 
streets of Benares. He may have been on the plains of 
Thibet, or even at Thibet, but let this be as it may I am 
sure that his reverence for Hindoo wisdom is based on 
some reason that does honor to his judgment and the 
better feelings of his nature." 

This extraordinary sermon, here noted 

down imperfectly, was a revelation to me, and I lost no 
time in some further inquiry and reading on the subject 
of Hindoo faith, and conclude that if instead of tech- 
nology and mechanics I had devoted as many years to 
mental philosophy I might be in a position to under- 
stand something of human desires, passions, senses and 
spiritual life as taught in Eastern philosopy, as it is I 
give it up. 

As to Hindoo magic, as we term it, every one has read 
of that, and as a reality have scoffed at it, properly so, 
because it will not square with the laws of gravity and 
other fixed principles that no one can doubt, but we 
never think of the minds and imagination of those who 
are looking on. 



186 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 



A German traveler, Dr. Hensoldt, has recently made 
his way into Thibet and written of esoteric science there 
in a way to disturb one's mind, but this digression, 
covering many pages in these notes, has gone far 
enough, and is excusable only on the grounds that many 
scientific men of .our day have taken up this subject of 
occult science in the East, and we may soon look for 
some rational, or at least possible, explanation of the 
mango trees and rigid ropes. 

Portland, Oregon, is on the Willamette 

River, near its mouth, nine miles below where this river 
tumbles over a considerable cliff. We found here a 
good many interesting things, a strange mixture of the 
head and tail, so to speak, of industrial art. Among the 
head things were stern-wheel steamboats, that had some 
approximation to the lines and make-up of theoretical 
marine craft, especially below the water-line, and the 
fact caused both myself and my uncle a good deal of 
concern. In the first place the wheels were much 
smaller in diameter than on our Western rivers in the 
Mississippi Valley, not more than two-thirds as large, a 
fact that no one seemed to be aware of, and which is yet 
unexplained. 

Going on board one of these steamers we found 
geared to one of these small wheels a pair of engines 
that by inference should have spun it around regard- 
less of the water at a rate equal to a wind-wheel in a 
gale, but nothing of the kind took place. We made a 
short journey in that same boat, up to the Cascades, 
about six hours' run, and the little wheel hung to the 
water like the rack pinion under a mountain locomotive, 
and there was no slip. 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 187 

The engineer said it was the form of the hull that 
had a clean ' ' run ' ' and left solid water at the stern for 
the wheel to work in, which seemed a contradiction be- 
cause a bluff flat-bottomed barge, like on the Missis- 
sippi hulls, leaves a following wake, dragged against 
the wheel, so it seems at least, but this will not do, be- 
cause here is ocular proof of the contrary, and the un- 
disturbed water theory must stand for the present. 

The engines were the best I had ever seen on a 
"wheel barrow" steamer, were well managed and push- 
ing along a boat to carry 800 tons of freight, eighteen 
miles an hour, with a cord of wood for fuel in that dis- 
tance. One boiler, a huge firebox one, set amidships. 
The whole thing was a revelation in stern-wheel boats, 
and deserves a dozen pages here if I knew how to write 
them. 

The Cascades are well named, and make a complete 
bar to navigation. The Government in a kind of 
desultory way is making sluices at the head of the 
rapids, and will be for many years to come,* but how 
a boat is to get to these sluices or locks up over half a 
mile of rapids, or go down over them, is a problem in 
"occult science." There will be a canal, no doubt, but 
there will be time enough to think of this in the remote 
future. 

In a government of and for railways, the improve- 
ment of waterways is a kind of sham set up to catch 
opinions and votes. It is like dredging out the channel 
to Galveston harbor, and letting out there the products 
of the Southwest that are now carried by railways to 
Eastern ports. It is not likely that any one now living 



*This work was finished, about three years later. 



188 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

will see a channel to admit ocean steamers to Galveston, 
and may never see steamboats going up over the Cas- 
cades and Dalles. The latter are other rapids farther 
up. This would be direct interference with railway in- 
terests, and not to be tolerated. This idea is my own. 



CHAPTER XXVIII. 

POPULATION WANTED THE LEAD-PIPE CINCH PIONEER- 
ING A NEW-MADE COUNTRY A MAN FROM BOLIVAR. 

Before going farther down the Pacific 

Coast one may observe here fully the nature and trend 
of what we may call the local civilization, not that this 
term applies to what is meant, but there is no other at 
hand. The keynote is found in two things — immigra- 
tion and imitation. 

There is continual effort to imitate the Eastern States 
in a country where climate, products and other natural 
conditions are different. There is, of course, a good 
deal that is original, but the latter is forced and not 
induced. This is natural, from the maintenance of 
highways and schools down to the hitch of a harness, 
but the immigration matter is not so easily accounted 
for. 

In San Francisco we are informed there are regular 
societies to promote immigration, and one can hardly 
run over a serial publication of any kind here without 
finding something about "more people on the Coast." 
This may be a desirable thing, but I think net. People 
have come here much too fast as it is, long before tnere 
were means to employ, regulate and govern them, and 
while much of the required machinery of population 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 189 

was wanting. This remark need not, however, be con- 
fined to the Pacific Coast. It is common all over the 
country, and one may ask for some logical explanation 
without ever receiving anything of the kind. 

Population is not strength, unless made up of "solid 
men." The imported thousands that come from Europe 
and Asia, with other thousands that are bred up to 
ideas engendered by this immigration, in politics for 
example, are no gain to a people, and I believe that if 
the population of the United States had not increased 
a single soul in twenty-five years past the country 
would be in a much better condition than it now is. As 
this has no hope of proof it is given for what it is worth 
as an opinion, an honest one at that, but the query is, 
where did this craze for population come from, and 
what is its incentive? 

With this cry for people has come about circumstances 
that repel nearly all except the dependent classes. One 
result is the difficulty and almost impossibility of 
operating with small capital, or by individual effort. 
It takes a "company" to do anything, and the company 
must be rid of competition if possible. A droll kind of 
a man we met as a fellow-traveler had studied these cir- 
cumstances, or rather had discovered them. Here are 
some of his remarks as near as they can be remembered : 

"People about here when they do busi- 
ness want a 'lead-pipe cinch' on what they are about, 
and they get it, not by monopoly always, but in another 
way. When a poor man, or any one man, starts a busi- 
ness he must put up the capital, and must meet the as- 
sessor when he comes around. He may make ten per 
cent, a year, perhaps more, and a company must do the 
same, but does the company put up capital? not much; 



190 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

they just figure it out. What money they have is bor- 
rowed on the bond dodge. The shares represent noth- 
ing, or a good deal less 2 except to swell the investment 
account. This is financiering, and to divide ten per 
cent, on the watered stock fifty per cent, must be 
earned on the real capital, hence there must be a 'cinch' 
somewhere, some kind of charter, privilege or right, 
which one man cannot command. The small man must 
be kept out of the way, and he is smashed somehow, 
hence our enterprises are large, large in many ways, 
and a poor man has only the privilege of wages, and not 
that in many cases. ' ' 

The "lead-pipe cinch" was a curious but expressive 
phrase, and describes perhaps too strong an idea of 
business that has grown out of the speculative era here, 
and is the bane of this country, as well as a good deal 
of the Eastern part. It was well illustrated by a stove- 
maker we called on: 

"I did pretty well," said he, "until they scooped me 
with capital. I was in the way, and they just shelved 
me. All I own here is my clothes. The store across 
the way has my foundry. Money is dear here and I 
did not have much capital, so could not sell on credit, 
but the merchants use credit where money is plenty and 
cheap. A stove foundry in Troy, New York, can borrow 
money at half what I can. Their agents here take 
farmers' notes for twelve months for stoves, and send 
the notes East as collateral, or sell as an investment. 
They soon scooped me." 

I submitted the droll man's notes to my uncle, who 
I found had been already carefully observing the same 
matter. "Tech," said he, "that notebook of yours is 
of no use in the present case. You might as well try 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 191 

to dock a ship in a wash tub. It will require some 
reams of paper to deal with this matter. You have 
struck the gr<-at economic problem of our time, coming 
like an avalanche, and you can only look and wait to 
see what turns up next. 

"The 'lead-pipe cinch' is no myth. It is a fact, and 
has another name, invented by Mr. Gladstone, who calls 
it an 'inequality of human conditions.' Where popula- 
tion is fixed 2 or nearly so, and where the opportunities 
of nature are watched and held in some equitable way, 
the inequality is not so marked, but as you go toward the 
edge, where things are new, prices unfixed, and the 
opportunities of nature are exposed to personal or cor- 
porate conquest, there you will see the 'lead-pipe cinch,' 
as your friend called it, also will find the struggle for 
existence intensified. Markets are narrow, population 
not assimilated, the sentiment of sympathy is weak, and 
people act like a multitude floundering in the water, 
each one trying to keep afloat by pushing the next man 
under. Laws are weak, or not enforced, and the race is 
exemplified by the ' devil take the hindmost. ' 

' ' Better end this topic right where it is in your notes, 
and make a cut-off line : ' If you want to be contented, 
fairly treated and happy, never live where the popula- 
tion of a country is rapidly increasing; keep to where 
there are sidewalks^ gaslights, good roads and a fixed 
population, and let others do the pioneering business. 
They are fond of it, crazy for it indeed, and there is no 
lack of recruits.' " 

I took his advice in so far as the present, but hope to 
learn more of this lead-pipe cinch matter before we get 
through. This "inequality of human conditions" is a 
striking name and theme. 



192 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

The making of railways up and down 

this coast calls for fortitude, and might well excuse a 
little water in the shares. As, however, any ideas set 
down here belong to my uncle, it is but fair to transcribe 
his remarks on the subject. 

"This country," said he, "is wholly unlike the At- 
lantic Coast. That is flattened out, settled down, and 
was finished thousands of years before this job began. 
It is all volcanic here and to the south, increasing as 
we go on, that is, more recent, and the whole structure 
is as if it had been shook up when hot and set down 
to cool. You don't see much surface evidence here in 
Oregon. It is a little older, but wait until you get to 
the Bay of San Francisco and thereabout, and you may 
run through miles of lava that has not been disinte- 
grated enough to form a skin of soil. Some places you 
will imagine yourself passing over an old furnace dump. 
There is scoria, puma and a lot of other matter with 
Latin names that we common people call slag when it 
comes from a furnace. There are whole counties of it 
in California, some of them not very well settled yet, 
because it is not long since some of these volcanic cen- 
ters were shaken out of semblance. 

"Up here there is a good deep surface strata, as the 
dense timber growth proves, but pretty soon you will 
see no more of this dense timber growth, except in 
valleys where the detritus has made depth enough. To 
build a railway here is a job, of course, and there is not 
only the physical impediments to construction, but the 
useful surface or area to be served is limited in the 
same proportion. 

"They do not need railways up and down this coast 
in such places as from San Francisco to Portland and 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 193 

Puget Sound. Nothing but an inadequate and law- 
harassed sea service permitted it. There is no finer 
chance in the world for a coast steamer service that 
railways could not touch, but it does not exist. The 
► Bssels are just large enough to induce seasickness, 
; nd long enough at sea to make it aggravating. A 
steamer should be at sea only thirty hours or so between 
Portland and San Francisco, and if of the first class, 
and large enough, very few would patronize a railway 
train that is nearly as long on the way. 

"Watch these valleys, or, what is better, look at your 
maps, and you will see that instead of leading to the 
ocean the common course is parallel to the coast, another 
sequence of volcanic architecture. Look at the great 
valley of California, stretching 400 miles parallel to the 
coast, the high ridges, with a lava cap hundreds of feet 
thick on top, and buried stream beds beneath where 
the miners delve and tunnel for gold. It is a queer 
country geologically, and in a good many other re- 
spects." 

We went down the coast by train, not 

by choice as a means of travel, but to see the country, 
and were much interested in various things on the route, 
especially when we passed Shasta, a snow-capped moun- 
tain, and descended into the valley of the Sacramento 
River. 

The transition from the fir belt, just below the snow, 
down to a tropical country in a few hours' run was 
amazing. As, however, this change is due less to altitude 
than the effect of winds and sea influences, the two 
things must be kept in mind. Get behind a mountain 
here, and you can plant figs and oranges. Go on the 
other side and none of this. Twisted trees and chapar- 



194 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

ral, cold too, and dried out in summer. I have seen 
somewhere a weather table made up from observations 
under the lee of a mountain 2,500 feet high, only ten 
miles from San Francisco and five miles from the sea, 
that corresponds to climate 500 miles south of there. 
The rainfall was double on the lee side of the mountain. 

The Sacramento River occupies or runs 

through a wide valley, draining hundreds of square 
miles of alluvial lands fertile in a high degree, and so 
dear in price we are informed that when bought at this 
day will not return taxes and interest, not an unusual 
matter here, however, in investments, because the real 
facts of production are too irregular to be estimated. 
People proceed on the assumption of maximum crops 
and high prices. 

Wheat, the principal product, is measured by the 
cental of 100 pounds, which is sensible. In ten years 
its value has gone down from 1.75 to 1 cent a pound, 
or 60 per cent. In this disappeared all the profit, and 
with it some of the cost of production, as it is figured 
or as it really is here. Wheat from being a surplus 
product of farmers has become here and elsewhere in 
large wheat-growing districts a "manufacture/' con- 
ducted with and having all the characteristics of "com- 
pany" operation, consequently without that element 
that founds and cements a community of farmers'' 
homes and villages. In this matter we met with what 
is the great and controlling characteristic of this portion 
of the Pacific Coast, and discovered it at first from a 
fellow-passenger who lives in a Sacramento Valley vil- 
lage. I have his words set down very nearly as deliv- 
ered, except the name of the town, which is changed. 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 195 

"I live in Bolivar, or what was Bolivar, in the valley. 
It was a kind of mixed town, a little farming, garden- 
ing, stock raising, blacksmithing, wagon and harness 
making, cooper shops, shoe making and the like. A 
main road from the foothill mines passed through the 
town, and the tavern did a great business. Every man 
was at work. There was plenty to eat and wear ; money 
too; churches, school and all this, but it ended. Rich 
men we had never seen got the land all around and made 
it into great farms. The railway built a branch through 
our main street. People came from the City, and set 
up two great stores, one for the men and one for the 
women. 

"A ramshackle train carrying people, merchandise 
and cattle came once a day crawling through, and 
charged ten cents a mile to travel in a box car, and for 
freight more than the wagons got twenty years ago. 
The shoemaker, blacksmith, cooper, and carpenter shut 
up their shops. Rich men's sons from the large farms 
make the town their evening resort. Bars, beer halls, 
game houses and the like sprang up, and Bolivar is the 
wretchedest place you can find. Not one man in ten 
works. There is nothing to do but to loaf around. No 
one builds a house 2 no one has any money, and what is 
wanting is a big fire, and then a wheat field on the 
ground where Bolivar stands. ' ' 

This was undoubtedly what is called here a mining 
town. They rise and fall with the mines. 

We are at the metropolis of the Pacific 

Coast, a veritable city "set on hills," not high ones, 
but enough for drainage and to furnish an incentive 
to invent cable railways, that widely spread over the 
world from here. 



\ 



196 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

One of these hills near amidships, offered a view over 
nearly all, but the best view of the physical environ- 
ments of San Francisco is obtained from an eminence 
700 feet high on the Marin County shore, north of the 
Golden Gate, or harbor entrance that bears this auri- 
ferous name. 

There is no city on the American continent that 
presents such a problem as this one. Nature by vari- 
ous means has made it the metropolis and more than 
this, the "entrepot" for a shore 1,200 miles long, and 
has obligingly neglected to indent the coast or other- 
wise form a harbor capable of great commerce through- 
out all this distance, except at San Francisco ; but here 
has created an inland sea with a coast line 500 miles 
long, surrounded by capes, channels, creeks and all kinds 
of shelter and other provisions down to fresh water in 
the northeast portion that stops the teredo from eating 
up, or down, the wharfs. 

I think it was the Hon. William Seward who once 
made a journey up along this coast and prophesied that 
it would some time contain a mass of people, wealth 
and activity, outrivalling the eastern side of the United 
States. 

There is much to warrant such a prediction. I might 
fill here a dozen pages with reasons for such an assump- 
tion, just as good prophecy as any one can make and 
the subject would be new, because the future of this 
coast, and especially of San Francisco, does not seem 
to concern the present generation even hereabout. 

The city by a little sea trade, a little zone of internal 
traffic, mining interests, some manufacturing and en- 
gineering work, has struggled up in forty years to about 
320,000 population. Mr. Potter's census of 1890 not 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 197 

being ready yet and of little use when it is ready, I guess 
at this estimate.* 

This city is the western door of the United States 
through which by all natural and trade laws must some- 
time flow outward and inward, the main foreign com- 
merce of the United States. In support of this idea I 
will turn back in my note-book to a little screed on this 
subject, by my uncle, delivered in a different connec- 
tion, concerning foreign trading. 

Said he: "We cannot trade to Europe except in 
natural products that grow here and will not grow 
there, or for which there is no room there. People of 
like power and similar civilization have no true basis for 
trade. Skill is portable, so is knowledge of all kinds of 
industry. To send our skilled products to Europe is 
like sending coals to Newcastle. The natural markets 
of San Francisco lie in South and Central America and 
in Asia. The trade of India for two thousand years 
proved the truth of this. Venice, Rome, Constantinople, 
London, Paris and Vienna were all built up by the 
trade of India. It was a golden stream that flowed in 
different directions in different ages, directed by wars 
and the circumstances of trade. Europe does not want 
anything from here except food, crude minerals, or other 
natural products, with now and then an invention or 
product of invention that is imitated there in a short 
time. ' ' 

This applies to our present subject of San Francisco. 
The people here do not realize or comprehend what they 
have in keeping, or their future destiny. They are 
mostly people who have come out from "home" in the 



♦Written in 1898. 



198 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

Eastern States, turn their backs to the ocean and look 
back inland for letters and mercantile supplies bought 
from their old friends. There is no grasp of the real 
situation. It is no wonder that energy and almost hope 
have been drubbed out of them by various paternal 
laws, State and Federal, that promote the idea of a 
"town on the border," also by especially active cor- 
porate interests that seem to control everything. 

One of the best informed men we have met said ' ' San 
Francisco is not a seaport, it does not lie upon or touch 
the sea. Vessels land in another jurisdiction and their 
cargoes to and from are carried across a narrow strip 
of State land between the city and the sea, the vessels 
paying toll for the privilege of landing and lying op- 
posite San Francisco and it is good luck that the General 
Government controls the navigable rivers and bays, 
otherwise that privilege would be bartered or given 
away. The connection with sea commerce, in so far as 
regulation or control, mainly consists in taxing vessels 
with municipal dues. It is a fine scheme, this taxing of 
property in another jurisdiction. It beats the old New 
Jersey taxes on the Camden and Amboy lines across 
that' State, which gave it the name of being a foreign 
country, but it will not work here the same way. The 
ship owners shift their vessels over to some other flag 
and country for registry. Think of an American line of 
steamers sailing under the flag of the Hawaiian Is- 
lands!" 

This, and other things said, led to considerable light 
on this great city, its policy, future mission and present 
status. It represents a cubic foot of destiny and possi- 
bilities crowded into a quart pot of enterprise; but I 
must get down to practical matters of the present time. 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 199 

San Francisco is afflicted with a numerous population 
not wanted elsewhere, patriotic people who leave their 
country for the country's good; honest, many of them, 
but of no use. They come out to this country to "pick 
up chances. ' ' A stranger is looked upon with distrust. 
The common sentiment is "What does this fellow want 
out here, unless he be a 'one lunger' looking for climate? 
What is his game?" 

No one can wonder at this feeling. It is not born of 
prejudice or of innate faculty. It is only a reflex of 
facts. This coast is the resort of incapable persons who 
come out here to pioneer among an unsophisticated peo- 
ple as they think, but as our friend quoted above said, 
' ' Lord, how they get fooled ! ' ' 

My uncle has made a preliminary tour among the 
machine shops and his remarks explain pretty well what 
was meant by the phrase quoted above. 

' ' I have been around the world a great deal, " said he, 
"and have seen all kinds of machine works and other 
factories, but never seen such traps for an unsuspecting 
stranger as I have this day." 

You come across an old tumble-down shed suggesting 
an antiquated soap works and inside find an equipment, 
practice and product that is right abreast of the times. 

Of course one who does not take into account the di- 
versity and nature of the work done might make a 
mistake, a large one; but think of twenty draughtsmen 
in an uld barn of a place making high class drawings 
of the work. What is done no one can find out. It 
would be a great deal easier to tell what is not made. 
You can go in and order a deck winch or a dredging 
machine, a locomotive, a line shaft, a mountain railway 
or mountings for a farm gate, it is all the same. As one 



200 NOTES BY A STUDENT. 

man said, "We make steamships, snowplows, sand 
scrapers, and now and then some picket fence to fill in 
with." I believed him. 

What could an ordinary routine workman earn in a 
place like that? Not enough for files, waste and oil. 

This aroused my interest, especially as my uncle said 
he had only been to some of the nearest and smaller 
works. 

One thing is evident, that this is the toughest case we 
have met with so far. The city, its connections, possible 
future and present being are problems with no answer 
in sight at this time. 

It takes time to think and more time to derive even 
vague inferences. It is a center with natural lines of 
trade reaching into Asia, the Pacific Islands, the South 
and Central American States and to an interior coun- 
try which is little more than a problem at this time, 
filled with mines and diverse mineral products, timber 
of a wonderful kind, a culture of the land and products 
that are new to this country, a population of diverse 
nationality, some living on ten dollars and some on ten 
cents a day. One must sit down and think awhile, per- 
haps a good while. 

It is the most chaotic of American cities, perhaps the 
most chaotic in the world, if that term is to mean an 
absence of purpose, mixture of pursuits, a blending of 
culture and the reverse. There is not a thing one can 
see that has not some local tinge, even down to boot- 
blacks who have open-sided kiosks with seats about four 
feet high, the interior is ornamented with pictures and 
the daily papers are always at hand. 

My uncle keeps up what the Scotch call a "deil of 
thinkin','' his analysis has received a heavy overload, 



NOTES BY A STUDENT. 201 

but he will grind it out in the end and there will not 
much get out of him until the grist is ground and bolted. 

There was a significant remark made by him today. 
"Tech," said he, "we had better get out of the hotel; 
this is not a boarding-house town and we can live inde- 
pendently in lodgings the same as in Europe and at a 
lower rate." 

This meant a stay of some time and it is agreeable. 




i,ER. ARY of congress 



028 137 920 



s 






